add a special Provides: to all login manager packages

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:17 PM, Tom spot Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 2009-02-18 at 17:14:12 -0500, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
>> The other thing to we should do is to strongly discourage people from
>> adding more of them to Fedora.  There's not a really good reason for
>> anything other than gdm and kdm to be included and supported.
>
> I'm not sure I buy this argument. Who gets to say what use cases are
> interesting to the Fedora Community? What if the next great window
> manager isn't GNOME or KDE?

I very strongly believe that something like Fedora can't be an
abstract project to put as many different pieces of software into RPM
form as possible, regardless of what kind of software it is and the
ramifications for the layers involved.  Instead, it should be focused
on a product or goal - desktop and server images being good choices.
And the question is how does the work involved impact those products.

There's a huge difference between say adding some random free software
OpenGL game a college student wrote on a weekend and swapping out the
login system for the OS.  Changing the login system has a *huge*
impact on how everything works and could easily result in confusing
problems higher up the stack.  You can't just swap in one or the
other.  Besides, that argument, it's far better for the Free Software
ecosystem if people try to cooperate on common projects.

Bottom line is that while it's certainly within anyone's rights to add
their new login manager, it's also within the rights of the people
working on the desktop to close any bugs filed by people using
something else WONTFIX.