On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:02:58 -0700 Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
Well, it's less Fedora-y in that we used to have this kind of conception where there were desktop environments, controlled by the desktop team. Then the login manager, system config tools, and probably some other stuff I'm not thinking of were controlled more or less by the distribution. GDM did stuff like setting language and keyboard layout, and wasn't really considered a part of the GNOME stuff (I don't think). It was expected that you could just swap out DMs (like skvidal thinks is still the case) and everything else should just deal with it.
Adam, That is exactly what I was thinking. Back in the mists of time my department at duke was one of the larger deployments of gnome (ximian gnome at the time). We had 100ish desktops running red hat linux and defaulting their logins to ximian's gnome. The gdm they shipped worked pretty well then at one point things went wrong and in order to allow for logins using nfs-automount homedirs we had to switch to kdm. We rethemed the kde login so it had the duke physics logos on it (which were cool pictures of lasers and masses of atoms!) and then swapped out gdm for kdm. No other issues crept up. The bits were all behaving and kdm did what I needed to do, so that was a problem solved.
I came at this discussion fully from that perspective and from the perspective of wanting to find a resolution that:
1. would end up with LESS need for discussion of aesthetics - since that seems to me to get murky, quickly.
2. where we didn't need to shove the maintainer of gdm in an awkward position trying to stand astride what fedora wants and what gnome wants - in terms of logo placement.
3. that allowed the fedora design team's decisions to be followed - since branding in this discussion does seem to fall under their purview.
Additionally, I want to point out that I agree with Notting that it's not without precedent that we replace some piece that is considered a component by gnome upstream b/c the distro wants something else - firefox being a prime example.
Finally, this was not meant to be inflammatory or as a 'nuclear option' - I didn't believe replacing a piece like the DM to be as tightly coupled as you seem to be saying it is. I'm a bit concerned as to what happens to our users installing from one of the other desktop env spins and then adding gnome or kde later. If I can dig out a spare laptop I may give that a whirl to see what goes off the rails.
-sv