gdm Create User

[Douglas McClendon]

Bill Crawford wrote:
> On 06/10/2007, Richi Plana <myfedora at richip.dhs.org> wrote:
> 
>> Well, that certainly sounds like a smart system ... and I'm all for
>> computers trying to be smarter than their users (if they can do it
>> successfully). But why add a timeout? I'm assuming finding out a list of
>> users from the console isn't a security issue (since they're displayed
>> as a list by GDM) so why not make the computer think one of two things
>> has happened: 1) the user mistyped the username or 2) the user wants to
>> create a new user. The system could ask which and ask for the root
>> password or directory administrator's password if it was a request for
>> the creation of users.
> 
> Because if you mistyped, you don't want some dialog popping up, or any
> kind of other UI, appearing in place of the username and password
> boxes you're about to fill in, again, hopefully with the correct
> username and password this time :) without a reasonable delay (given
> that someone who's expecting to be allowed to create a guest account
> will either wait, or ask the owner of the machine what to do next, or
> ...).

> Actually, how about just having a "create as new account" button
> appear, but NOT FOCUSSED BY DEFAULT along with the login failure
> message?

I admit, that I haven't completely sold myself on the idea as it was.  I 
really was aiming at having a really open-to-guests mode.  Then I tried 
to combine that with the desire to have user creation at gdm.

Something like what you said, but a bit different, would be to have the 
login button focused by default, but a button next to it as 'create new 
user and login'.  Then have things happen pretty much the same (as f7), 
though perhaps with the failed login user/passwd 'text' remaining in 
that highlighted-but-will-disappear-on-keystroke way, and a failure 
message that indicates that the user can either attempt to retype in the 
failed user/passwd, or click the 'create user' button which will spawn 
that dialog prepopulated with the existing user/passwd.

Basically what that gets you, is that you can legitimately accidentally 
mistype your username, get the same failure message (jiggle), then with 
the exact same keystrokes as before, retype in 
username-tab-password-enter, and login.  Or, if you had really wanted to 
create a new user, you either would have clicked the alternate create 
user button rather than using the default focused login button via 
<enter>, or, now upon seeing the 'invalid username/passwd' message but 
the text still there, click on that button.

$0.02...

-dmc