Login Manager Story

[Sebastian Kügler]

Hi,

In this email, I'm sharing the results of our session about the login manager 
during the Plasma sprint in Barcelona. It's not conclusive, but gives a pretty 
good overview of the situation. These notes concentrate on the two most viable 
options right now, but we realize that the decision for or against a login 
manager is in the hands of our downstreams. What we can do is make the 
integration easy, but also only to a certain degree. Pros, cons and the 
preliminary conclusions are marked with + and - respectively.

SDDM:
- Wayland support not yet there
- Core functionality is incomplete
- we'd likely end up maintaining it
- Qt5 port unfinished
+ possibly more control about direction
+ GPLv2+
+ Qt/C++, ties in well with our skillset
+ upstream is interested in Wayland support
+ we could collaborate with Red Hat

LightDM:
- Copyright assignment
- Wayland story utterly unclear
- C/QObject-based
- bad experience with close collaboration with Canonical
+ well-tested, works today
+ Qt5 backend available, front-end to be done
+ LGPLv2
+ short term, it's less work


For both cases, the Wayland story is quite unclear still. The decision is 
definitely not a clear-cut one, both have significant benefits and 
disadvantages.

Our idea of direction so far is to provide a set of QML files so that both can 
integrate well visually, and revisit the situation after this summer.

Feedback is of course welcome and appreciated.

Cheers,
-- 
sebas

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