GDM Suggestion

[Stuart Children]

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 19:25, Seth Nickell wrote:
> Switchdesk is toast. The way we should be handling it at this point is
> prompting when you login to a non-default session through gdm.
> 
> "Do you want to make WindowMaker your default?" sort of thing.

Yes indeed...

> On Wed, 2004-05-26 at 13:25 +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
> > On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 02:14:36AM +0100, Stuart Children wrote:
> > > I think the issue is that there are two tasks - choosing a session for
> > > gdm, and choosing a session for startx. For former is handled fine at
> > > login time by gdm's own code (currently disabled).

... which as has been mentioned is exactly what the standard (upstream)
session chooser already does! It also address the other problem I
mentioned (of automatically picking up which "desktops" are installed -
by using .desktop files). This was enabled in RH9 IIRC.

However, it does *not* address the latter task - namely, being able to
select a desktop for using with startx. Now, if the consensus is that
those people should edit their own .Xclients, fine - but there are
already messages in this thread saying we want a tool for that.

Which is presumably why FC is currently using switchdesk - presumably to
have consistency between what you get when trying to change sesson in
gdm and whilst actually within a session. However, switchdesk is flawed
for reasons I have already explained. Part of its functions are still
needed though, so we need a replacement (or basically, to rewrite it).

To be specific, what I'm proposing is:
* Change gdm to use its standard session chooser - making FC more
"standard" with other GNOME desktops, closer to upstream, and giving you
behaviour you mentioned above.
* Rewrite switchdesk so that it offers the same list of desktops that
the gdm session chooser does by using the same .desktop files.
* Change the gui of switchdesk to clearly set the session for 1) logging
in graphically [1], and 2) logging in on the console (ie: startx). This
is what my mockup is for.

[1] Granted, this is bad because it duplicates functionality - however,
users will try and change their session whilst within X. If there is a
tool there that appears to do what they want, but doesn't (because it's
actually only for console X startup) they *will* be confused. As most of
the code will be there anyway (for .Xclients generation), the only extra
thing you're adding is the code to set the gconf key or whatever gdm
uses to decide what your current default session is.

When you say "Switchdesk is toast" - I agree it should be! I'm trying to
discuss a replacement. Is someone in RedHat working on this, or has a
decision been made regarding the startx use-case? If so, please let us
know. Otherwise, I'd like to help implement this.

Cheers

-- 
Stuart