Bug#564071: gdm: GDM does not pick up sessions in /var/lib/menu-xdg/xsessions/

[Bill Allombert]

reopen 564071 Bill Allombert <ballombe at debian.org>
quit
On Thu, Jan 07, 2010 at 04:29:37PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 07 janvier 2010 à 14:30 +0000, Francis Russell a écrit :
> > GDM is not picking up xsessions that are stored in /var/lib/menu-xdg/xsessions. It appears this
> > was removed in Debian bug #464179. Is there some Debian policy that specifies where xsessions should be
> > registered? Otherwise this seems like a bit of a hack. 
> 
> The only place to register for X sessions is /usr/share/xsessions.

Where is it documented ?  Do you really want menu-xdg to generate xsessions in
/usr/share/xsessions?

If xsessions is anything like the other existing XDG specification, it is
trivial for GDM to read xsessions file in /var/lib/menu-xdg/xsessions.  The
only real issue is #464179 but first duplicated entries is not a critical
problem, and if xsessions were documented it would be possible to avoid the
duplication by merging the list instead of concatening them. In any case it is
possible to alleviate this problem in two ways:
1) add a Debian submenu for sessions files in /var/lib/menu-xdg/xsessions.
2) remove xsessions files in /usr/share/xsessions for window manager that are
not XDG compliant and use menu.

> > At least one window manager (ratpoison) uses the
> > menu-xdg system to register itself. Please see Debian bug #563959.
> 
> The Debian menu system has no mechanism for identifying X sessions. It
> adds all window managers to known X sessions, which is utterly wrong
> since a window manager has absolutely nothing to do with a session
> manager. You need to use the XDG specification instead.

The XDG specification does not cover xsessions files which are utterly
undocumented, and Debian menu entries that needs="wm" have to provide X
sessions to work anyway. If you have example needs="wm" menu entries that
do not provide X session, please tell me and I will get them fixed.
If you means something else, then it is trivial to extend menu to 
cover X sessions, but that is only an issue for menu-xdg.

Anyway, GDM being the default display manager should work with all the 
window manager and cannot force window managers that does not implement
the XDG specification to provide an xsession file, especially with the
lack of documentation.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe at debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.