Bug#975631: debian-policy: window manager: remove reference to Debian menu
On Tue, 20 Sep 2022 at 21:45:28 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I just found https://bugs.debian.org/838777, which says packages that only
> provide a window manager without a mechanism for launching programs should
> not register as x-window-manager
See also https://bugs.debian.org/1004522 in which I proposed adding a
wayland-session virtual package, and in the process, ended up also proposing
x-session for /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop.
In particular https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1004522#30
has a brief survey of what display managers actually do, and
in https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1004522#66 I tried to
document existing practice (which contradicts #838777).
> try to document what x-window-manager is really for in the new X world
This is part of what I tried to do in #1004522, but I was trying to
document what it is now (including literally-only-a-window-manager window
managers like mutter, not just tiny-desktop-environment window managers
like twm or openbox), rather than what it should be.
If we redefine x-window-manager to mean something that is more strict than
it is now, then we'll have a mixture of x-window-manager implementations
that meet the new requirement, and (perhaps essentially unmaintained)
x-window-manager implementations that don't; so I'm not sure that's such a
good idea. That's why I proposed adding a new virtual package instead.
I personally think the fully-integrated-system approach should be
that packages that want to be considered to be a session that you
can log into (potentially ranging from GNOME/KDE all the way down to
twm) should register themselves in /usr/share/xsessions/*.desktop
(or /usr/share/wayland-sessions/*.desktop), user-friendly display
managers like gdm/lightdm/sddm should list those and only those,
and people who want to construct their own tiny desktop environment
out of a window manager and some xterms should enable it by installing
something resembling
https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/gdm/-/blob/debian/master/debian/custom-x11-session.desktop
into /etc/X11/sessions. gdm3 installs that file into
/usr/share/doc/gdm3/examples for sysadmin convenience, but intentionally
does not install it in the search path.
Rationale: people who want to piece together their own desktop environment
programmatically are welcome to do so, but that setup inherently requires
configuration. Trying to list ~/.xsession in UIs is confusing to novice
users, because the display manager cannot know what it will result in,
so its user-facing name has to be either very technical ("Xsession")
or hopelessly vague (older gdm's "System X11 Default") or both; so we
should not inflict that UX on users who have not done the necessary
setup to get it to behave as they want it to. For a setup that already
requires configuration before it will be usable, adding one more piece
of configuration doesn't seem like an undue burden.
gdm3 (>= bookworm), sddm, slim and lxdm already follow what I'm advocating
here.
smcv
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