KDM plans and lightDM

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Tuesday 14 June 2011 10:35:49 Harald Sitter wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 8:16 AM, Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Jun 2011 16:29:45 -0400, Shaun Reich <predator106 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> lightDM is also headed by my dear friend Canonical, as is clearly seen.
> >
> > Serious question: does anyone know if it requires Canonical's copyright
> > assignment to contribute to lightDM? If yes we can stop any further
> > discussion right here IMHO.
> 
> <apachelogger> robert_ancell: ahoy, is LightDM covered by the
> canonical contributor agreement?
> <robert_ancell> apachelogger, no
> <apachelogger> robert_ancell: ever going to be?
> <robert_ancell> apachelogger, no
> <robert_ancell> apachelogger, the greeter we develop will be afaik,
> but the rest of it not
Thanks for asking
> 
> > There are of course more issues to think about when considering using
> > something in our workspace that's developed by Canonical. What about we need
> > changes Canonical does not like for what reason ever? Who of us can work
> > with launchpad and bazaar? It's not the environment we are used to work with
> > (same true for GNOME devs who want to participate in development). Personal
> > opinion: if Canonical wants other to use it as real cross-desktop, the first
> > step should be move the code into freedesktop's git repository.
> 
> Indeed, issues worth considering.
> 
> I personally believe that "wanting to have something the other party
> does not" is really a global issue to all of free software. If I want
> Amarok to be able to remote control my space ship, but the Amarok
> developers do not, then there is little I can do about that as a
> non-contributor. Well, except for trying to convince them from the
> long-term advantage that such a feature would provide. If however I
> would want Phonon to have such a feature, it is more likely to get
> accepted as I am contributor to Phonon. I suppose it is a bit of a two
> class society for every project those-that-do-stuff vs.
> those-that-don't. While we should keep this in mind, I do not
> generally think that it is something to base decisions on. From the
> preemptive fear of not having 100% of control we'd otherwise have to
> clone every library we use. Well, actually even the OS. Hello KDEOS ;)
I don't think a comparison with libraries holds. We use libraries to build applications including 
the DM. But the DM is part of our workspace offering. Without a DM we no longer provide a 
complete workspace experience. So this is a completely different toppic and cannot be 
compared with our policies for libraries and other OS integration.

To my knowledge this would also be a novelty that we replace a part of our workspace with 
a 3rd party application.

As a workspace developer I consider the possibility to align all our workspace applications to 
our needs as very important. Let's just consider we would want to start into an activity from 
the DM... My arguments might seem far*fetched, but from an integrated workspace 
development point of view, they aren't (at least IMHO).
> 
> I agree with your argument that code should be hosted in a FDO git
> repo, though I personally believe that Launchpad  is from a management
> perspective much easier to use for small projects as it puts every
> aspect of management into the hands of the project itself (commit
> access to repos, bug management etc. etc.). So, I can completely
> understand why one would be using LP even as a freedesktop.org
> project/thing, even if I find it not sensible at all to do this while
> using the freedesktop.org website, thus fragmenting one's project
> *shrug*.
> But generally speaking I also see this is as a non-issue in terms of
> the discussion at hand. The hosting system in particular is an
> implementation detail of forming grounds to collaborate on. Now, to
> ask anyone to use a ground we are familiar with (vs. one the other
> party is), we'd first have to know that we want to collaborate.
Agreed that this is only relevant for the case that we want to use lightDM.
> At any
> rate it probably does not make sense to take such things into account
> for any technical discussion as long as the system in use is easily
> accessible. Otherwise all of free software would be using Git, not
> because it is superior, but simply because everyone else does.
Actually I think from a workspace point of view it is a technical issue if one of our 
applications is hosted in a version control system that is not git. Especially if it is a bizarre one 
that is only used by one distribution. It means that not each workspace developer is able to 
easily check out the sources and apply patches. So yes, sounds very much like an issue to 
me.

Cheers
Martin
> 
> regards,
> Harald
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