[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#690898: lightdm: Please allow to choose between AccountsService and ${HOME}/.dmrc

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Package: lightdm
Version: 1.4.0-1
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

ligthdm originally used the file .dmrc in a user's home directory
to store the default session and language per user.

As someone filed an upstream bug report to replace .dmrc with
AccountsService known from gdm [1], the lightdm developers added
support for AccountService and lightdm would now use .dmrc only
when AccountsService is not available which is not the case
on most systems (since gdm3 depends on AccountsService, for example
and gdm3 always gets installed when gnome3 is installed).

While AccountsService works nicely on a local setup, it is rather
problematic in an enterprise setup with network logins through
LDAP or NIS and an NFS-shared home directory. The problem is the
fact that AccountsService stores the user settings for default language
and session in /var/lib/AccountService/users/$USER which is usually a
local filesystem. Thus, whenever a user changes the computer they use
to log in, their stored default session and language are lost which is
rather annoying and more or less defies the point of AccountsService.

I would therefore suggest to allow to configure whether lightdm uses
the .dmrc file or AccountsService to store this information. The
best would be an option in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf to keep this
information. The default setting should be "auto" which will
use AccountsService if available and .dmrc otherwise plus allowing to
set it to "accountsservice" or "dmrc" to allow custom configuration.

Cheers,

Adrian

> [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bug/823718