bug#22835: Autologin

[Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 11:32:46AM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:
> > Looking at the code in gnu/services/xorg.scm, I find the following definition:
> > (define* (slim-service #:key (slim slim)
> >                        (allow-empty-passwords? #t) auto-login?
> >                        (default-user "")
> >                        (theme %default-slim-theme)
> >                        (theme-name %default-slim-theme-name)
> >                        (xauth xauth) (shepherd shepherd) (bash bash)
> >                        (auto-login-session #~(string-append #$windowmaker
> >                                                             "/bin/wmaker"))
> >                        (startx (xorg-start-command)))
> > It also is a bit surprising; since I had added only xfce to my packages,
> > I expected this to start. Or is this impossible to realise?
> 
> I have a working auto-login configuration using “modify-services”:

Sorry, I forgot to describe what "does not work" in my opinion. With
auto-login? set to #f, I get the login screen with a selection of sessions.
By default, xfce and ratpoison, since these are the packages present in the
default configuration. I deleted ratpoison from my configuration, so I can
only log in to xfce after typing user and password.

Now when I set auto-login? to #t, it does not log into xfce, but launches
the command given in auto-login-session. So I end up with windowmaker, which
did not even appear in the package list (but probably gets pulled in auto-
matically somehow). So at the least, the parameter needs to be documented.
I easily modified it to launch startxfce4 of the xfce package instead, and
ended up in xfce. Maybe this could be made the default choice anyway to
be consistent with our example desktop configuration?

More logically would be to log into one of the sessions that is also
proposed when auto-login? is set to #f. But this looks more complex, even
more so when there are several options present (which ones to choose?),
so maybe just documenting the command would be enough.

Andreas