I'm proposing LightDM [1] as a replacement for GDM. I started the proposal for this in GNOME 3.0 [2] but due to the young age of the project I thought it better to wait until 3.2 before making a full proposal. This is it. I apologise this has been done after the proposal period.
Why replace GDM? - LightDM is a cross-platform solution. Ubuntu is planning to switch to it this cycle, and other distributions have expressed interest in the project. By sharing this piece of infrastructure GNOME can spend more time working on important GNOME components. LightDM is aligned with freedesktop.org. - 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 Architecture can be a personal opinion, and I encourage those with programming experience to look at the code and decide for themselves. Note that LightDM is not lighter in features, but in architecture. - By having a well defined interface between the greeter and daemon, it is significantly easier to develop a greeter without knowledge of how display management works. This is useful as the skillset and motivations of these two sets of developers are different. - LightDM is a platform for future work and is investigating the use of new technologies like Wayland. The details: Purpose: Cross-desktop display manager Target: desktop Dependencies: libglib, libpam, libxdmcp, libxcb, libxklavier, gobject-introspection, libgtk+ Resource Usage: Launchpad for source control and bug tracking [1], tarballs in public ftp [3] (in process of moving to freedesktop.org) Adoption: Accepted for use in Ubuntu 11.10, interest from other distributions GNOME-ness: Display manager is cross-desktop, example GTK+ greeter is fully GNOME compliant. I would recommend this module is maintained in the GNOME servers to get all the build and translation support. 3.0 readiness: GTK greeter currently using GTK2, but all other code uses latest GNOME standards. License: GPL3 [1] https://launchpad.net/lightdm [2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-October/msg00226.html [3] http://people.ubuntu.com/~robert-ancell/lightdm/releases/ _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
