Setting disable_user_list to true causes gdm to crash on clicking "Log In"

referenced in SRU bug 518810 and 398300

just to make it a link: bug 398300

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After some more investigation, it turns out this is a problem only with oem installs. After an oem install, you are left with /etc/gdm/custom.conf with the following contents:

[daemon]
AutomaticLoginEnable=true
AutomaticLogin=oem
TimedLoginEnable=true
TimedLogin=oem
TimedLoginDelay=10

If I remove this file, gdm 2.30.2--0ubuntu1 works fine, and has a number of improvements over the previous version.

I'm not certain what is responsible for creating, or supposedly removing this file, but it looks like it shouldn't be there, and if it is, gdm 2.30.2--0ubuntu1 breaks if you disable the user list.

do you have an "oem" user on your box? could you figure what setting create the issue exactly? is that an issue with the current update candidate version?

The "oem" user gets removed at the end of the oem-config process. I'll have to do some checking to see if a specific option breaks it, but I notice that a standard (non-oem) install doesn't have the file at all, so it seems like the oem-config process should remove that file upon completion. Though it also seems like gdm itself might be better equipped to deal with the problem.

This is not a problem with the current version in proposed, but 2.30.2 does have some fixes we are looking forward to getting, which the version in proposed doesn't offer.

It appears that the problem is in the TimedLogin feature. If you set TimedLoginEnable=true, you must also set a valid user in TimedLogin and a valid delay in TimedLoginDelay. If either of those is not set, or if the TimedLogin user is invalid, as was the case once "oem" was removed, then the behavior described above occurs. Keep in mind that this all depends on the user list being disabled.

thank you for the extra informations, it should be enough to work on the issue