[RFC] Merging LightDM into KDE Workspaces (forwarded from plasma-devel)

[David Edmundson]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 11:53 PM, Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net> wrote:
> 2012/8/22 Albert Astals Cid <aacid at kde.org>:
>> El Dimecres, 22 d'agost de 2012, a les 13:58:57, David Edmundson va escriure:
>>> As you're all probably aware I've been working on a new login manager
>>> for KDE [1]. Currently known as LightDM-KDE, named as it is based on
>>> the display manager backend LightDM [2].
>>
>> How's the upstream of ligthdm? Have you worked with them? Do you feel it's an
>> upstream open to our needs?
> Lightdm is NOT a Canonical project, it is developed by Robert Ancell
> and as far as I know there's no CLA to sign. (I haven't contributed to
> the project yet) From the very few moments I spoke to Robert I'd say
> working with him is really nice and there won't be problems.
> Regarding the Canonical-CLA-issue: I also had my bad experiences with
> this, so please, please, never do anything like this in KDE (again)!
> But for LightDM I have no objections, +1 from me for this!

Anything that I'm proposing putting into KDE workspaces is the code in
KDE playground, it has _nothing_ to do with Canonical or upstream
LightDM, no CLAs, our git servers, our bugtracker, completely ours.
Has been since the start, always will be. This is the KCM and all the
front end code and the only part you'd ever really want to work on.
There's absolutely no

I think the backend, LightDM, is now a Canonical project. It was
started by an employee in his free time to experiment whilst he
maintained GDM, and it became his day job. However that doesn't make
it bad, it's only the CLA that has a potential to be an issue.

It is currently _NOT_ listed in the list of CLA covered projects
http://www.canonical.com/contributors.

Assuming they made it covered, it's worth noting the Canonical CLA has
changed _significantly_ since those high profile "comments" that I
think you're referring to were made. Trolltech also have had a CLA,
and to me they seem pretty similar (though I'm not a lawyer). Even if
it was covered, this only puts it on par with libzeitgeist which is
already being utilized in KDE. In the absolutely worst case ever we
would fork the backend which remains LGPL and ship that.

IMHO it's really not much of a big deal. It's always distributable
under LGPL, and it's not code that we in KDE would ever really need to
change anyway.
I will email and try and get some additional clarification anyway.

Dave

> (btw, I agree with Sune: One display manager is enough. But we could
> do a "transition phase" where both DMs are present. I'd also like to
> hear what KDM developers think about this.)

I was planning on this. I want to merge mine as an optional build, and
I want to make KDM optional but still defaultly enabled.

Reality is that distributions are already shipping one or the other,
we (KDE) should support that. KDM won't survive a port to Wayland so
when it starts to phase out we can drop it.

Dave

> Cheers,
>    Matthias