On my netbook I'm running a pretty vanilla install of squeeze, although my personal desktop session is very different to usual.
I wanted to add a command-line option to my X server. I spent 15 mins trawling through docs and grepping for config options with no luck. So I asked a search engine. It turns out that: * There is no way to do this without patching the gdm source code or using dpkg-divert to wrap the X server with a shell script * Such a feature was requested in a bug in the RH/Fedora bugzilla in June 2008 [1]. It's also in our BTS [2]. And in the upstream BTS multiple times with patches (September 2009, October 2010) [3]. Despite a lot of demand, it still seems that this simple and essential feature simply wasn't on anyone's radar. * Worse, in September 2011 one of the upstream authors seems to poo-poo the idea [4]! It looks like they are resistant to sanity. gdm3 also has the crazy XAUTHORITY bug [5], which was reported to upstream [6] who inserted a completely crazy "fix" [7] showing they totally fail to understand how all this stuff is supposed to work. That bug was fixed in Debian by the X maintainers adding a workaround to the core X session startup scripts. Madness. We should not still be using this software. I don't have much of an opinion about the rest of gnome because I don't use it. But we should be "considering our position" as they say. Ian. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=451562 [2] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=651693 [3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=586777 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=632045 [4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gdm-list/2011-September/msg00006.html [5] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=586685 [6] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651431 [7] http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=199386 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20293.32681.953043.814...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
