OOGA ----
(If you have no clue what gdm is, skip a few paragraphs down first)
I've cc:ed the desktop-devel-list on this announcement because I I think it is a good idea to put Interface Change notification in release notes. I also think it is a good idea to announce upcoming interface changes when possible. It doesn't seem the current "Release Planning for Maintainers" guide discusses this.
The 2.6.0.8 release of GDM is worth upgrading to, I think. George Lebl and I went through the logjam of patches in http://bugzilla.gnome.org and applied all of them except a few that had issues, see bugzilla for details. The GDM bug count was reduced from over 180 bugs to about 134. GDM could use some additional love in the usability area and a usability review would help to resolve many bugs. Refer to bugs 71215, 117780, and 105918.
Anyway, lots of new stuff in GDM:
A11y:
GDM now supports a11y much better by supporting STRUTS in its window manager. STRUTS makes it possible to launch GOK and the magnifier at login time. Without this, programs like GOK and the magnifier would obscure the login window.
GDM's gesture listeners now support XInput style gestures, so users who depend on XInput devices can now launch AT programs with their XInput devices.
Refer to the GDM Documentation to learn how to launch AT programs like GOK and Gnopernicus from the login screen, and to learn about using a11y themes in GDM.
http://yippi.hypermall.com/gdm/
IPv6:
Bug fixes have been applied to the IPv6 code. It has now been soak tested for some time here at Sun and I believe this code is pretty solid. It is a new feature, so I recommend testing it. You can turn on IPv6 support by using the --enable-ipv6=yes configure option.
Solaris:
GDM now builds and works much better on Solaris and this is the first release I would recommend using on Solaris platforms. Note that GDM only supports logindevperm on Solaris 10 so for earlier versions of Solaris you might want to use "chmod +rw" commands in the PreSession/PostSession scripts to allow read/write access to needed devices for the user (e.g. sound card). GDM also supports auditing on Solaris 10 and later.
GDM is the GNOME Display Manager, it is the little proggie that runs in the background, runs your X sessions, presents you with a login box and then tells you to piss off because you forgot your password. It does pretty much everything that you would want to use xdm for, but doesn't involve as much crack. It doesn't use any code from xdm, and has a more paranoid and safer design overall. It also includes many features over xdm, the biggest one of which is that it is more user friendly, even if your X setup is failing. The goal is that users should never, ever have to use the command line to customize or troubleshoot gdm. It of course supports xdmcp, and in fact extends xdmcp a little bit in places where I thought xdm was lacking (but is still compatible with xdm's xdmcp).
Interface Changes ==================
I would like to announce that the next version of gdm will be 2.8. I plan to rearrange the way that GDM installs itself to the filesystem. This will remove the /bin/gdmXnest, and the /usr/bin/gdmconfig script that is used to just run gdmsetup. All gdm binaries except gdmthemetester and gdmphotosetup will be moved to /sbin since they are really intended only to be run by root. The gdm-binary program and the gdm script will be merged into one binary called gdm. This will reduce the footprint of GDM and will make GDM better follow standards. It will mean that distributions may need to make minor modifications to their installations where they depend upon the current file installation layout.
This release has a few minor interface changes that user's and system administrators should be aware of:
+ Code has been added so that the GDM slave process will now source /etc/environment if it exists. This improves GDM's ability to work properly on AIX machines. System administrators should be aware of this new feature so they can also take advantage of it. Refer to bug 135401.
+ The way the configure script builds the default User and Root password has been modified. It should no longer add redundant directories to the PATH and should avoid putting symlinked direcrories in the PATH. I don't think it will be necessary to further tweak the code, but we can improve this further if needed.
+ The /bin/gdm script has been modified so that it now sets LC_MESSAGES to LANG if neither LC_MESSAGES or LC_ALL is set. This ensures that gdm can display in a system's default language if only LANG is set. This provides better l10n support. Since this affects the user environment, I wanted to highlight this modification.
Looking at the GNOME "Release Planning - For Maintainers" guide it seems that Interface Change notification is not discussed, and the "sample" release note seems to be an example of a release that has no significant interface changes. Refer here:
http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/for_maintainers.html
Current example:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-April/msg00052.html
Perhaps this release note would serve as another example, and could the instructions be updated to highlight that explaining interface changes in release notes would be useful?
News: =====
Highlights of 2.6.0.8:
- Enhanced a11y gesture listeners so they support XInput events for better a11y support. (Bill Haneman).
- Add STRUTS support to gdm2's window manager for better a11y support (Bill Haneman).
- Improved the way the user's default PATH is set up by configure so it is set more sanely without redundant PATH's, and is more careful about not putting symlinked X11 directories in the PATH. Now can configure user's default directory via the --with-post-path argument. (Brian Cameron).
- New configuration option to disallow visible feedback in password entry. (John Martinsson).
- Fix width of "user name entry" to shrink to fit parent widget so text does not run out-of-bounds. (Chookij Vanatham)
- Restart slave process if XDMCP chooser is selected from flexi server. (Leena Gunda)
- Make default face obey the MaxIconWidth and MaxIconHeight configuration settings. (Diego Gonzalez)
- gdm2 slave now sources /etc/environment if it exists. (Vicent Berger)
- Correct gdmsetup's tooltip to conform to GNOME HIG. (Sebastien Bacher)
- Use ngettext for translation. (Christian Rose)
- Set default font size to "Sans 12". (Erwann Chenede)
- Set name of password entry for more friendly a11y (Erwann Chenede)
- Mark "Remove Theme" for translation. (Balamurali Viswanathan)
- Remove <span> tags from language display since they were causing formatting issues for some users. (Glynn Foster)
- Ensure LC_MESSAGES is set so the user's default language can be displayed (Hidetoshi Tajima).
- Specify font for username/password entry for gdm2 supplied themes. (Alexander Kirillov)
- Add Kinyarwanda and Armenian to language list. (Steve Murphy and [EMAIL PROTECTED])
- Correct IPv6 logic so that it supports an IPv4 XDMCP request when IPv6 is enabled. Fixed configure help for --enable-ipv6. (Brian Cameron)
- Set more sane Reboot/Halt/Shutdown commands on Solaris. (Brian Cameron).
- Correct the usage of IFS in the Init/PreSession/PostSession/Xsession scripts so it works on Solaris. (Leena Gunda)
- Support logindevperm on Solaris for automatic/timed login. (Brian Cameron)
- Swap Alt and Meta keys on Solaris. (Leena Gunda)
- Correct IPv6 identification for Solaris. (Leena Gunda)
- Cleanup. (Mark McLoughlin and Kjartan Marass)
Note: GDM2 was originally written by Martin K. Petersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, and has for a while now been maintained by the Queen of England. She is usually not responsive to bug reports or feature requests. You can try to send them to me however.
Note2: If installing from the tarball do note that make install overwrites most of the setup files, all except gdm.conf. It will however save backups with the .orig extension first.
#ifndef GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED Note3: Note3 has been depracated ... #endif /* GDM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED */
Downloading: ============
Webpage: http://yippi.hypermall.com/gdm http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/gdm/2.6/
No RPM this time around BTW. Have fun. A spec file is included though, so you can try:
rpmbuild -ta gdm-whatever.tar.gz
Have fun,
Brian
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