kdm

Oswald Buddenhagen ossi at kde.org
Sun Sep 7 11:33:07 BST 2003


moin,

i'm in the process of changing some things in kdm. particularily
interesting is the directory structure.
according to current kde standards the layout would be something like
this:

$KDEDIR/share/config/kdm/{kdmrc,...}
  -> config, obviously ...
$KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/sessions/*.desktop
  -> session type definitions
$KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/users/<name>.{face,face.icon,dmrc}
  -> users's big images (preferably 300²); this won't be used right now
     except as a fallback
  -> users's small images (should be 48²)
  -> users's dmrc-s in shared dir *)
  - the dir is 0755 owned by root, the dmrc-s are 0600 and are owned by
    their respective users. the admin might want to give the users
    ownership of their faces as well.
$KDEDIR/share/apps/kdm/kdmsts
  -> state file, currently saving only the previous user on every
     display

*) the usual mode of operation is to have ~/.dmrc (an extended version
of the current ~/.wmrc), but some remote file systems don't grant access
to home directories before authenticating, even to root.

however, according to fhs and what configure --help outputs, this is
utterly broken:
  -> as opposed to typical kde applications, kdm's files in share/config
     are not only system defaults, but the real r/w config. consequently
     it belongs into some etc/ dir. i'm not overzealous about that part.
  -> the face files are something between configuration and working
     data; i think it should go to var/lib/
  -> share/apps as the location of the dmrcs and kdmsts is simply out of
     question, as this is kdm's working data and definitely does not
     belong on a potentially read-only partition.
     fwiw, previously no shared dmrc dir existed and kdmsts was saved in
     share/config, which is definitely wrong.
we have a few more global daemons in kde, so this situation definitely
needs clearing up.

the second part ... jirka (the gdm guy) an me are trying to create
something like a standard for dm configuration. it's supposed to cover
session type definitions, the previous session type saving and user
images (faces). the dir layout would be something like that:
/etc/X11/sessions/
 -> every compliant window manager/desktop environment installs its own
    .desktop files here. for "legacy" wms a common package needs to be
    created.
/var/lib/dm/
 -> generally working data. for kdm that would be kdmsts
/var/lib/dm/users/<name>.{face,face.icon,dmrc}
 -> global face and saved session choice location
 it might be an option to split out the faces into an own directory, like
 /usr/share/lib/faces, /var/lib/faces or even /etc/faces, given that this
 could be considered global [configuration] data.

comments from core developers are explicitly welcome. ;)

greetings

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