add a special Provides: to all login manager packages

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at googlemail.com
Thu Feb 19 02:52:29 UTC 2009


Am Mittwoch, den 18.02.2009, 18:10 -0500 schrieb Colin Walters:
> On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
> >  Changing the login system has a *huge*
> > impact on how everything works and could easily result in confusing
> > problems higher up the stack.
> 
> Just to give a concrete example, how GDM uses PAM is highly
> nontrivial, involving separate processes because of PAM's
> ill-specified nature among other things.  GDM also interacts with
> various complex cases like smartcards that in turn involve other
> system daemons.  

Other login managers are not supposed to support smartcard
authentication. So why should that be a problem for them?

> There is quite a bit happening inside GDM/PAM even on
> a default desktop that may not be obvious, such as how gnome-keyring
> saves your password to unlock the keyring.  How gnome-keyring works
> depends on various bits of infrastructure including dbus (this is a
> tricky issue).  NetworkManager in turn depends on gnome-keyring.

NetworkManger-gnome depends on gnome-keyring, not NM itself. That's a
big difference. All this stuff you are talking about is (more or less)
Gnome-specific, so this is a really bad argument. In fact this is a
point I should have added to my list of reasons why gdm doesn't work for
everybody.

There are other ways to store passwords than gnome-keyring-daemon and
there are ways to manage your networking than NM-gnome. 

> So yes, swapping out the login manager could quite easily result in
> not being able to log in to your WPA network. 

You mean: Connecting to your WPA network _with__NM-gnome_. I have tried
gdm, xdm and slim with Gnome, Xfce and LXDE and in all combinations
NM-gnome automatically connect me to my wireless network just fine.

Regards,
Christoph




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