Hi all, Many WMs and DEs don't play nice with one another and don't always follow freedesktop.org rules. There's a bunch of open bugs (detailed below) and I'm sure I've missed some more.
Also, different DMs (kdm, xdm, gdm, ...) have a lot of unique or, conversely, duplicated or forked scripts which aren't DM-specific and so should only exist once. I want to work on this, but cooperation between and changes to many WMs are required, so I'd like to hear from other people who are interested. These bugs all tend to get stuck, so I'm posting this to the list. Currently a user cannot easily switch WMs or DMs (or use several interchangeably) without doing a lot of manual work to carry along settings that can and should be neutral. (When I say WMs, I sometimes mean entire DEs like KDE/gnome - basically whatever gets a session entry in a DM. Gnome can switch its actual WM easily enough; that's not my point.) ===== Bugs overview (probably missed some): ===== #89870: long story, summary: .desktop files are installed in different places. KDE only reads the KDE ones, Gnome only the Gnome ones (and both use a small common set). So each DE doesn't benefit from the other's apps (.desktop files aren't just for menus but also for e.g. services/actions on mimetypes/etc). 'Lightweight' WMs with a menu are forced to choose one of the above to display. (And if you merge both, the result is currently very ugly.) #53517: xdm, kdm, gdm (don't know about entrance and such) each have their own set of a lot of configfiles: Xaccess, Xreset, Xservers, Xsession, Xsetup, Xstartup, Xwilling... Obviously bad. Today some files are shared / not duplicated (gdm <-> xdm, kdm <-> xdm), but the work is not complete. It seems gdm only has its own Xsession now, and if people confirm this I can work on getting rid of all of kdm's separate files as well. BUT I still need cooperation here because there might be some features in kdm's files which would need to be merged into the common (xdm?) ones. #26326: unifying scripts that run on X sessions startup/shutdown. A lot of non-WM-specific stuff, e.g. starting ssh/gpg agents, lives (often duplicated) in DM-specific or WM-specific scripts. #14872: unifying DM session scripts, handling of ~/.xsession, etc. The bug is closed but I think some things mentioned there haven't been fixed. Some other bugs which are assigned to specific teams like KDE would be fixed or helped along by a generic solution to the bugs above. ============= P.S. in some of the cases above, e.g. #89870, some people have said that KDE is the real problem because it installs several fdo-like trees (eg of .desktop files or of icons), no two of which can coexist, and all of which are outside the main tree in /usr. This may be true in some cases, but if the latest version of KDE somehow magically appeared in /usr, non-KDE users wouldn't be happy either (#89870 again). That's exactly why I want to hear others' opinions and what people would like to see. -- Dan Armak Gentoo Linux developer (KDE) Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD 0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951
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