LightDM-KDE

[Harald Sitter]

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:56 AM, David Edmundson
<david at davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Harald Sitter <sitter.harald at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi David,
>>
>> On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 1:06 AM, David Edmundson
>> <david at davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
>> > There's so much I intend to get done with it, but I've been really busy
>> > trying to get KDE Telepathy out. It's all already consuming far more
>> > time
>> > than I really should let it.
>> > Anyway. What's the current state and what needs to be done:
>> > Robert Ancell (the main LightDM guy) has ,been refactoring the backend,
>> > which
>> > has led to some changes in the Qt lib which I'm not 100% happy with.
>> > Instead
>> > of just jumping on dbus, we now have a lot of GTK lib copying+pasting
>> > with a
>> > thin Qt wrapper in the main class of the greeter. At a minimum I want
>> > this
>> > moved out to a separate private class to give a very clean maintainable
>> > header to the publicly exposed main lib. Ideally we'd want someone like
>> > George Kiagiadis involved who is extremely pro at auto-building Qt
>> > bindings
>> > for GTK and get a library that isn't going to fall apart as soon as the
>> > GTK
>> > version updates.
>>
>> Selling a GTK+ dependency to people will be *very* difficult, so I
>> think DBus is the better choice really.
>
>
> My bad, I worded that very badly. It's copied and pasted native C code, that
> is then either bound to GTK in the GTK lib, or Qt in ours. There's no
> lib-dependency.
> The point is that it's copied and pasted code. That's never a long term good
> sign. We don't want the two going out of sync.

Oh, yeah, that is absolutely good.

> It does seem like the LightDM backend suddenly lost it's DBus interface and
> I'm not sure why.

This is not so good :S

>> There were no particular decision set in stone about using Plasma.
>> Just seemed like an obvious choice. I must say having a QML greeter is
>> certainly intriguing too, especially since I understand Canonical
>> wants to invest in a Qt greeter anyway, so we could share resources
>> there.
>>
>
> What I would like to see is a list of things we want to do with the greeter
> - and then we can discuss the best solutions for doing it. I'm talking to
> Alex Fiestas on IRC, I'm not /that/ against plasma, I just want to the right
> solution chosen properly, not because it's the latest buzzword.

Sane technical decisions FTW.

requirements that come to mind:
* must be able to support finger print auth stuff
* must be able to support face detection auth stuff
Both from a GUI POV of course.

>> BTW, you can listen to the session at [1]
>>
>> [1]
>> http://mirrors.tumbleweed.org.za/uds-o/2011-05-13-12-55-desktop-o-kubuntu-lightdm.ogg
>
> Will do, Thanks.
> Can I propose that:
>   - We all get our thinking caps on, come up with ideas for "our ideal login
> manager" (including the KCM)
>   - We get some idea from Robert (and anyone else on the main LightDM side)
> as to what upcoming changes in the backend we can expect.
>   - I'll tidy up the library code, and make it both QML and Plamsa ready
> (pretty much the same thing, more models, more property macros etc.)
>   - From here we have an IRC meeting to discuss the plan.

- Discuss stuff upstream and with other distros

Sounds like a plan!

regards,
Harald