Andy Wingo <wi...@igalia.com> writes: >> Do we really need a compile-time dependency (GDM in master doesn’t >> depend on gnome-shell, after all), or can we just have a hard-coded >> /run/current-system/bin/gnome-shell somewhere? Granted, that’s not very >> elegant, but it might be good enough? >> >> Also, one can use GDM without using GNOME, so it would be best if GDM >> didn’t depend on GNOME. > > This might be fine (and is what I was trying to do). However this would > mean that the GDM service should ensure that gnome-shell is there, which > in practice is like having a dependency on GNOME or at least on > gnome-shell. My understanding is that GDM uses gnome-shell as the login > greeter process, so you really can't use GDM without GNOME -- of course > you can log in to some non-GNOME session but GDM itself will use > gnome-shell. Given that's the case, might as well depend on gnome-shell > explicitly.
That’s my understanding too. GDM needs gnome-shell to run the greeter interface. (I think that “gnome shell” at different times means both a framework for making interfaces – like GDM’s greeter – and the particular desktop interface used by Gnome 3. It’s a little confusing.) Therefore, it should probably be one of GDM’s inputs. That being said, to do it well would be a ton of work. First we would have to slice out the library to avoid the circular dependency (like I mentioned earlier), then we would probably want to revisit gnome-shell’s inputs because I doubt it /needs/ libgweather (for instance) and I assume that people who want to use GDM with i3 or whatever would like gnome-shell to be as slim as possible. Anyway, for now I am sprinkling references to “/run/current-system” in the service definitions to make sure all the components find what they are looking for. Later, when I can /actually/ start a usable session with GDM :), I will try to clean things up a bit. >> With this and the other changes you described, it looks like there’s >> already a bunch of patches we could apply. Would you like to send them? >> :-) > > I'd be happy to review. I'd also be happy to apply them :) There's no > currently-working thing to break -- we can only get better -- so I think > it's OK to noodle on the problem in master. > OK. I will try and send a proper patch this evening. Thanks for the encouragement. -- Tim