KDM plans and lightDM

[todd rme]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Harald Sitter <sitter at kde.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 June 2011 15:37:25 Shaun Reich wrote:
>> Everybody talks about it like it's some magical unicorn that hasn't
>> been spotted before, but the truth is, it's staring everyone in the
>> face.
>>
>> In fact, I have dealt directly with this separation when I've been
>> working on the Plasma frontend, and based some of it around the
>> original kfrontend (qwidget) code. So I don't see what the big deal
>> is, considering I've already worked with this myself...
>
> My argument was more in the general direction of moving things that we should
> not be heavily involved with elsewhere, and I believe that the larger DM logic
> is such an area. By outsourcing (what a nice word) this part in technology
> that is used by more than one party we get more exposure to actual production
> systems, thus more testing and in the end better quality in the long term (not
> that anything was wrong with the quality of KDM, just saying).
> Now, I reckon that XDM could, or perhaps should, have been exaclty that,
> though it did not quite work out.
> It still seems like a nice enough idea to share generally sharable things.
>
> To me, as someone who is not terribly knowledgeable in the area of display
> managers, it just seems like a waste of resource to have stuff implemented in
> not all that different ways on different ends (GDM and KDM). Though since there
> is no plan to have GDM replaced by LightDM on sytems other than Ubuntu this is
> all a bit moot. Even though I think sharing with part of the ecosystem is
> still better than no sharing at all.
>
> --
> Harald
>

There seems to be an implicit assumption here that if we are going to
go the cross-desktop route it would have to be LightDM that we pick.
But if KDM is already pluggable enough that you can easily rip out the
GUI and write and entire new one from scratch, and (as best as I can
tell) already hs most of the features lightDM wants to add, why
shouldn't we basing the cross-desktop DM on KDM instead of LightDM?

I gather from the discussion that most, if not all, the features that
KDM still needs are also lacking in LightDM, while KDM has lots of
features LightDM does not.  So if we are talking about wasted
resources, wouldn't it waste far fewer resources to add those new
features and add the Gnome-centric bits in KDM than to add the new
features, old features, gnome-centric bits, and KDE-centric bits in
LightDM?

-Todd