xdm

xdm

[Marco van Hulten]

Hi—

I see quite some issues passing by of login managers.  Would it be a
good idea to provide XDM?  I have been using it a lot (especially in
the form of xenodm under OpenBSD) together with .xinitrc and I cannot
remember ever having any issue with it.

It would probably be easy to make it a standard option.  Maybe port
xenodm back if there are interesting bug fixes or features in there
that are not in xdm.

I wish I had more time to do better research or write some code for
Guix, but I've not right now.

—Marco

Re: xdm

[ng0]

I have bits of an xdm package somewhere in my vault/archive of
"packages to send to guix once I find time to contribute again".

What makes it more complicated / time consuming with xdm is that
you need to figure out the service for it.

If you or anyone else wants to work on it, I can send a patch (external, not applying to
guix.git).

Fwiw, I looked at the work OpenBSD does with their X11 patching (for more time than I am willing to admit),
and it's not worth to extract and re-apply the meaningful patches
for one single project. I don't get why parabola is re-purposing this X11 work,
but OpenBSD work is usually written for OpenBSD with an underlying OpenBSD
system in mind. That's not to say their X11 is "useless", it's just useful
in OpenBSD.

Re: xdm

[Marco van Hulten]

On 26 Nov 14:06 ng0 wrote:
> I have bits of an xdm package somewhere in my vault/archive of
> "packages to send to guix once I find time to contribute again".
> 
> What makes it more complicated / time consuming with xdm is that
> you need to figure out the service for it.
> 
> If you or anyone else wants to work on it, I can send a patch (external, not applying to
> guix.git).

To be honest, I have not allocated enough time for Guix development for
any significant contribution like an xdm package.  I hope 2020 will be
better.  I hope someone else wants to work on it before that time (but
in my current Guix installations the desktop manager, whichever this
is, works properly).  In any case, I can make time for testing Guix
code if that is useful at all.

> Fwiw, I looked at the work OpenBSD does with their X11 patching (for more time than I am willing to admit),
> and it's not worth to extract and re-apply the meaningful patches
> for one single project. I don't get why parabola is re-purposing this X11 work,
> but OpenBSD work is usually written for OpenBSD with an underlying OpenBSD
> system in mind. That's not to say their X11 is "useless", it's just useful
> in OpenBSD.

Point taken.  Seems reasonable.

—Marco