[793] in athena10
Re: Changes to debathena-gdm-config
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Jan 8 14:38:38 2009
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Anders Kaseorg <andersk@mit.edu>
Cc: Geoffrey Thomas <geofft@mit.edu>, athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901081245540.11108@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:39:11 -0500
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On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 12:53 -0500, Anders Kaseorg wrote:
> And similarly for this. What problems do the other directories cause? It
> is not Debathena’s job to delete lots of functionality from Ubuntu just
> because it isn’t “supported by Athena”. We should only remove
> functionality that is actively harmful to Athena users.
>
> As discussed on Zephyr, the global Xsession is supposed to run for the
> alternate session files. Did you find a bug where this isn’t the case?
> If so, that’s the bug that we should fix.
>
> Anders
The problem created goes like this:
The current session choices on offer from the Athena 10 Login greeter
are:
Last session
1. Run Xclient script
2. GNOME
3. Secure Remote Connection
Failsafe GNOME
Failsafe Terminal
To someone unfamiliar with the nitty gritty of how sessions actually are
implemented, there is much room for users hurting themselves by making
the wrong choice.
The least toxic of these choices is #3. It's merely useless. The reason
why it shows up is that it's picked up by what got installed by default
in /usr/share/xsessions. Choice #2 is also picked up from there.
I classify choice #3 as toxic because it looks to a naive user like it
is the session to pick. As a naive user myself, I saw, "Last session"
and decided that after I'd run Failsafe, that I needed to select a
session to stop being logged in Failsafe. Knowing I needed to run
GNOME, I picked #2, broke things, and never really clued into how,
"You're just supposed to know to Run Xclient Script".
Short answer to your question: It seems like the simplest way to avoid
picking up session types that will help users screw themselves is to
leave them out of the search path on Athena Workstation.
Does this clarify?
-Bill
