On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 04:44:49PM +0200, Robert Ancell wrote: > On 13 May 2011 16:01, Matthew Garrett <mj...@srcf.ucam.org> wrote: > > On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 02:59:06PM +0200, Robert Ancell wrote: > > > >> - I am confident that the LightDM architecture is simpler than GDM. > >> Some indicators of this: > >> - Smaller code size > >> - Well defined interface between greeter and session > >> - Less dependencies > >> - Less internal interfaces > > > > The daemon side of LightDM (including the gobject bindings) is about > > 10,000 lines of code, which compares to 35,000 lines in gdm. Are they > > feature comparable? Does LightDM currently implement the same user > > switching interface? > > It has a different user switcher interface, but backwards > compatibility is something I am looking into (as well as defining a > XDG standard for display manager interfaces).
Standardising this behaviour would seem like an advantage, providing we don't have semantic differences that the desktops will want to rely on. > > Practically speaking, in order to avoid feature regression the obvious > > way to use LightDM would be to port the existing gdm greeter to the > > LightDM backend. Who would be doing that work? > > It certainly is an option. I think the ideal solution would be to > make implement a clutter based greeter as designed for GNOME 3 [1]. > While I will be working on LightDM for the next six months, I don't > feel I have the time to make this shine and someone would need to > volunteer for this work. I'd expect that a prerequisite for adoption would be functional equivalence. If the greeter is to be maintained by some third party rather than yourself, how is the maintenance overhead reduced over using gdm? > > This is a benefit, but I'm not sure it's a huge one. The platform in > > general hasn't been designed with "Make it easy for users to write new > > UI for existing applications" as a goal. > > Sure, but I think the current solution has been held back by the > difficulty of doing this. We will want to revamp the greeter/shell in > the future (or new technology might require it) and being able to do > that easily is useful. The greeter isn't just about presentation. There's a great deal of code in there that's tied into desirable features. If we move to new technology we'd presumably want to keep that functionality, so it's not obvious that implementing a new greeter would be easier than modifying the existing one. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list