On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 06:18:09PM -0500, Brian Cameron wrote: > This sort of design is contrary to the way people want GDM to work > on other distros, so I am unsure if the changes needed to make it work > this way would go upstream. Most other distros want it to work with > all local userids out-of-the-box as it does in other popular operating > systems.
I don't think the local user heuristics are a good idea on any Unix or Unix-like OS. I don't mind if the upstream community prefers to have those heuristics on Linux or *BSD, but I don't think those heuristics are at all appropriate, so let's not have those on Solaris. > But, as you say, we could use #ifdef's or perhaps add a configuration > option to make it work any way we like. Yes. I'd prefer #ifdef, because if someone enables those heuristics then we can have surprises later on when some other change breaks those heuristics. > Fair enough. I think requirement (a) is probably a hard requirement > and is likely going to be a TCR. Some questions, I think, remain: > > - Is requirement (b) a TCR or not? IMO: yes, but I'm not an ARC member. Moreover, I think solving (a) makes it trivial to solve (b) -- we've discussed a variety of schemes that solve (b) already. > - If the new GDM does not meet requirement (b) then does this mean that > we need to disable the Face Browser so it can't be used, or just be > turned off by default? I'd say "disable the Face Browser so it can't be used". > - Assuming we have time to meet both requirements, will the Face Browser > be turned on or off by default? IMO: on by default. Whether AI disables it by default is another matter (and, IMO, AI should disable it by default). > >And the face pics can be updated at any time, not just at login time. > >All the more reason to update the cache at logout time. > > Agreed for face images. OK. > >>Normally you only want the local users to show up in the Face Browser. > > > >Not so! I might want the last few users to login to appear in that > >browser, without regard to whether they are local. Take my desktop > >system on SWAN for example. My $HOME is remote, and my user account is > >defined in a non-files name service, but why on Earth should GDM not put > >my username and face pic in the face browser? > > The way GDM currently works: > ... > The way you suggest it should work: > ... > I also suggest it could work: > > - Nobody shows up initially > - The users show up in the face browser after you log into them the > first time. Yes that's fine. > >The whole notion of that GDM needs to care about whether a user is local > >or not is broken. Please remove it. > > I guess the question for now is whether this means we have time to > fix the Face Browser as described for initial integration. If not, I > am guessing that "removing it" means removing the entire Face Browser > for now. I think so, yes. > >>A logout update is not necessary for caching this file since the choices > >>can only be selected in the login GUI before authenticating. If the > >>values change, you know they have changed before authentication. > > > >Consider a user with a shared home directory. That user may login to > >multiple hosts at different times. > > If the dmrc file is saved in /var/cache, then the defaults are machine > specific. If we move the dmrc file to /var/cache, then there would be > no $HOME configuration file to worry about. If you are suggesting > that GDM try to sync the $HOME/.dmrc file with the one in /var/cache, > then I don't think that is worth the bother. It seems more sensible to > not assume that the user wants to use the same session type on every > machine they log into. The same sessions and languages might not even > be available on all the machines a person wants to use with a shared > $HOME directory. Making it more machine specific seems to make more > sense to me since sessions and languages are also machine specific. That's fair for dmrc, but not for face. Since both files could have the same cache semantics you don't necessarily save code by not bothering with caching/syncing dmrc. But I don't mind if dmrc becomes a purely local matter. In fact, I would even prefer that. Consider a multi-lingual user with multiple systems/zones/VMs but with one home directory, and who wishes to login with different locales on different systems. For such a user a purely local dmrc would be much better than storing the dmrc in $HOME! Nico --
