[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

Wed Mar 7 15:49:04 CET 2012

'Twas brillig, and Shlomi Fish at 07/03/12 14:09 did gyre and gimble:
+> Hello Colin,
+> 
+> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:15:29 +0000
+> Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
+> 
+>> 'Twas brillig, and Wolfgang Bornath at 07/03/12 10:13 did gyre and gimble:
+>>> 2012/3/7 Guillaume Rousse <guillomovitch at gmail.com>:
+>>>> Le 07/03/2012 10:26, Colin Guthrie a écrit :
+>>>>>
+>>>>> Hi,
+>>>>>
+>>>>> Unless someone comes along and does a reasonable amount of coding before
+>>>>> mga2, I think we'll have to deprecate supporting startx (it can still be
+>>>>> used in some circumstances, but audio and accelerated graphics will not
+>>>>> be available).
+>>>>>
+>>>>> See this comment (and the link therein) for more info on the issue:
+>>>>> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4652#c9
+>>>>
+>>>> What is the operational translation of 'deprecating support of foo' ?
+>>>> automatic answer "no support" to any user reporting issue with it ? removing
+>>>> it from the distribution ?
+>>>>
+>>>> While I don't care about the first one, I do care about the second
+>>>> interpretation. Given the very high fragility of the gnome environment
+>>>> nowadays, using old-days tools to workaround those various issues is
+>>>> frequently useful.
+>>>
+>>> Different from Guillaume I do care about the impact for the user.
+>>> There are many out there who are used to startx and also docs and
+>>> howtos which use it. Therefore we will need an explanation for
+>>> switching off startx.  An explanation to be used in forums, which is a
+>>> bit more than just a link to a bug report. In other words: to be
+>>> understood by non-techie users.
+>>
+>> To answer Guillaume's question, I wasn't personally planning on removing
+>> it fully. Just documenting that it is broken and that users should not
+>> use this as a mechanism for starting X.
+>>
+>> I would propose just putting in "echo 'startx is deprecated. Here is
+>> why.....   Press any key to continue anyway.' >&2; read -n 1" in the
+>> startx script such that users using it will be warned. Does this seem
+>> sensible?
+> 
+> Having to press this every time will drive me nuts. If you are going to do it,
+> please also use an optional environment variable to trigger it off.
+
+Env var or a switch to pass to it (and you could then put alias
+startx='startx --no-session-warning' or similar in your bashrc? Thinking
+about this, it might make more sense to warn the user AFTER they have
+logged in... e.g. via zenity or knotify or similar. But again with the
+option to hide it still)
+
+> Luckily for me (and for Mageia) I am a programmer and can write the required
+> code to make startx play nice with the rest of systemd again. I'll read the URL
+> of the bug and see what is needed and hopefully with some guidance from the
+> people on Freenode, will make it work. If anyone wants to help, I'm "rindolf"
+> there and I'm also reachable by other forms of IM and by other means:
+
+It would be nice if you wanted to take on this project. Basically you'd
+be writing a DM (like gdm) which is able to talk to PAM and do all those
+things needed for proper session management. Of course your DM would be
+very much cut down - i.e. it would not actually have any UI, but just
+implement and autologin system.
+
+I'd imagine how it would work is that your program would be installed as
+setuid, thus regular users can run it, it can find the username who run
+it and store that, then call the necessary commands to gain root
+privileges, do the whole pam conversation and then login the user. This
+will require a specific PAM config (e.g. /etc/pam.d/startx) to allow
+passwordless authentication for your user.
+
+This is just a very rough overview of what would be needed.
+
+Good luck :)
+
+Col
+
+
+
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+