DM communication standard

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Sun, Aug 08, 2004 at 10:40:31AM +0200, Raffaele Sandrini wrote:
> There were some thoughts about this earlier but they never made it
> into one of eather GDM or KDM.
> 
yeah, some 8 months ago ... on the bright side, i now actually did it. i
had a deeper look at gdm's protocol and dismissed it for various
reasons. what i did is more like kdm's old fifos (the commands are even
backwards compatible), only with a new transport and a return channel.
the code is in kdebase/kdm/backend/ctrl.c.

one thing i don't paticularly like about this is in fact the shutdown
stuff you mentioned ... i think its over-engineered for usual users
(apart from the shutdown type, you specify a delay, a timeout and a
timeout action), and possibly still not sufficient for the really
adventurous setups. maybe this should be better integrated with the
generic event scheduler proposed some days ago (hey, i already said this
in the other thread and nobody noticed ;).
another missing thing is a system wide shutdown notification - that's
for the thread about notifications.

as for d-bus ... yeah, i wanted to do this originally as well. but havoc
didn't seem to be overly-excited about the idea and suggested staying
with a separate control protocol - dunno if he still stands to this
view. and the second reason being, that kde did not arrive at the d-bus
revolution, yet ...

> George, Oswald: I think you should reconsider this issue. As a last
> resort, every app communicating with DMs could implement both, KDM's
> and GDM's way doing that, but that is not really a resonable solution.
> 
yeah, i expect gdm to adapt kdm's new way. :-]=]
i did this in a hurry without checking with george first, but judging by
the conversation we had before i expect george will have no real
objections against my stuff. the transport was already agreed upon and i
made the protocol extensible (see "caps" command), so gdm can add stuff
i left out in kdm (btw, "my" command set is not complete, yet).
oh, george, now that i was pointed at your existance again ;), would you
mind reviewing ctrl.c _r_sn, so i can pull the emergency brake before
our release if necessary? not that the stuff is already documented or
even used anywhere, but better if it's not there at all, if it's going
to change anyway - i left kdm's old fifos in for now.

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