Am Mittwoch, den 18.02.2009, 18:10 -0500 schrieb Colin Walters:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 5:37 PM, Colin Walters
<walters(a)verbum.org> wrote:
> Changing the login system has a *huge*
> impact on how everything works and could easily result in confusing
> problems higher up the stack.
Just to give a concrete example, how GDM uses PAM is highly
nontrivial, involving separate processes because of PAM's
ill-specified nature among other things. GDM also interacts with
various complex cases like smartcards that in turn involve other
system daemons.
Other login managers are not supposed to support smartcard
authentication. So why should that be a problem for them?
There is quite a bit happening inside GDM/PAM even on
a default desktop that may not be obvious, such as how gnome-keyring
saves your password to unlock the keyring. How gnome-keyring works
depends on various bits of infrastructure including dbus (this is a
tricky issue). NetworkManager in turn depends on gnome-keyring.
NetworkManger-gnome depends on gnome-keyring, not NM itself. That's a
big difference. All this stuff you are talking about is (more or less)
Gnome-specific, so this is a really bad argument. In fact this is a
point I should have added to my list of reasons why gdm doesn't work for
everybody.
There are other ways to store passwords than gnome-keyring-daemon and
there are ways to manage your networking than NM-gnome.
So yes, swapping out the login manager could quite easily result in
not being able to log in to your WPA network.
You mean: Connecting to your WPA network _with__NM-gnome_. I have tried
gdm, xdm and slim with Gnome, Xfce and LXDE and in all combinations
NM-gnome automatically connect me to my wireless network just fine.
Regards,
Christoph