Ubuntu
gnome-shell package

Split GDM packages

Bug #1162849 reported by Pierre-Antoine Champin
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
gdm (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned
gnome-shell (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

The problem is that when someone using Ubuntu with Unity installs gnome-shell, they are prompted to choose a display manager but there isn't enough information about which one to choose.

Original bug report
-------------------
gnome-shell depends on gdm;
however, it is possible to use gnome-shell with another session manager (esp. lightdm which is the default on ubuntu).

So this dependency seems too strong. It should either
* be changed to a recommend
* be a dependency on gdm | lightdm (possibly adding other session managers?)

See original description
Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

gnome-shell won't run if you don't have gdm installed. See bug 1054288 for more information.

Changed in gnome-shell (Ubuntu):
status: New → Invalid
Revision history for this message
Tim Lunn (darkxst) wrote :

we could split out libgdm into its own package and depend on that?

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

Tim, I looked into doing that and it didn't seem possible. Maybe you'll have better luck because it would be rather nice if we could do it.

Revision history for this message
Pierre-Antoine Champin (pchampin) wrote :

Thank you Jeremy for this information (I had an intuition that it might be the case, but wasn't sure).

Re. Tim's proposal, an idea could be to have a packaged called "libgdm" that would contain all the binary files (including executable), and a package calle "gdm" that would only contain the configuration scripts that (propose to) install gdm as the default session manager (and the latter would obviously depends on the former).

Pros: would provide a better user experience for people installing gnome-shell (or other libdgm-depending packages)
Cons: it is a bit of a hack (and might even be forbidden by the debian/ubuntu package-naming policiy??...)

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

Thanks, that does sound like a way to split the package. I'm going to go ahead and re-open this bug so that if anyone wants to work on that idea, they can.

summary: - change dependency on gdm
+ Split GDM packages
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Tim Lunn (darkxst) wrote :

It should be sufficient to just include the following files in a seperate libgdm binary package (well these are symlinks so also need the corresponding files for /usr/lib/gdm)

/usr/lib/gnome-shell/Gdm-1.0.typelib
/usr/lib/gnome-shell/libgdmsimplegreeter.so.1
/usr/lib/gnome-shell/libgdm.so.1
/usr/bin/gdmflexiserver

There is no dependency on any of the other gdm binaries that I am aware of.

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

Re-opening the gnome-shell task as I'm hesitant to have gnome-shell depend only on libgdm until bug 1181632 is fixed.

Changed in gnome-shell (Ubuntu):
status: Invalid → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package gdm - 3.8.1.1-0ubuntu5

---------------
gdm (3.8.1.1-0ubuntu5) saucy; urgency=low

  [ Simon McVittie ]
  * Tell dh_shlibdeps to look in libgdm to satisfy the shared library
    dependencies, and add a shlibs.local for them
 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:22:02 -0400

Changed in gdm (Ubuntu):
status: New → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-shell - 3.8.3-1ubuntu4

---------------
gnome-shell (3.8.3-1ubuntu4) saucy; urgency=low

  * Depend on libgdm instead of gdm and suggest gdm. This avoids needing to
    choose between lightdm and gdm when installing gnome-shell (LP: #1162849)
 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Mon, 22 Jul 2013 21:00:17 -0400

Changed in gnome-shell (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
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