Re: let's talk about SLIM

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi,

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:

> ng0 <ng0@infotropique.org> writes:
>
>> It seems to me as if SLIM can be dropped once we
>> have something else in place. Would you agree?
>
> It would be good to keep a display manager service that is lightweight
> in terms of both resource usage, runtime-dependency closure, and
> build-dependency closure.  I'm not attached to SLiM, but I would not
> consider the existence of a GDM service to be sufficient grounds for
> removal of SLiM.
>
> Apart from the needs of those on older hardware, or those who wish to
> build everything locally from source code, I'm not sure if we've ever
> successfully built GDM on a non-Intel system.  GDM depends on mozjs-17,
> which I've never managed to build on mips64el-linux, and it fails on
> armhf-linux too.  Fixing mozjs on mips64el-linux is probably not
> trivial, and yet I'm happily using SLiM on my Yeeloong, which is still
> the only non-Intel GuixSD system as far as I know.

I agree we should not remove SLiM.  I think the question is more about
the default we want to have.

For people using %desktop-services with GNOME and all that, it probably
makes sense to default to GDM.

For the lightweight-desktop example, it may makes sense to stick to a
lightweight login tool.

One grief I have against SLiM is that it lacks i18n support.  If lightdm
fixes that, I would recommend it instead of SLiM in the
lightweight-desktop example.  I haven’t investigated though.

Thoughts?

> Personally, I'd be much happier with a working system that could be
> audited and not have the audit become stale before its completion.  The
> amount of code churn in my systems is so great that it's infeasible for
> me to audit all of the changes coming down the pipe.  I find that very
> uncomfortable.

On one hand I sympathize (I don’t use GNOME/KDE/Xfce and have long tried
to avoid tools depending on the whole Freedesktop stack in my “base”
system), but on the other hand, I think we have to realize that (1) no
single individual can audit more than a tiny fraction of their system,
and (2) when it comes to running a full desktop environment, we’re even
further away from that goal anyway, GDM or not.

Thanks,
Ludo’.