Comment 63 for bug 408417

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 05:42:31PM -0000, Keith Edwin Smith wrote:
> As Scott says and moreover. Ubuntu could have "solved" this trivially.
> Ubuntu decided to package a broken version of GDM when an older
> functional version exists that is totally compatable and already working
> and in place in older versions of Ubuntu.

The older version of gdm is unmaintained and Ubuntu does not have the
resources to continue maintaining it in an appropriate fashion.
Furthermore, the new version that is missing XDMCP support is missing it
because it's a redesign/rewrite of GDM that is not yet a feature-complete
replacement - but as a result of that redesign, it brings in many other
features that are not possible to retrofit onto the old version, which are
also important to many users.

So there is a tradeoff here. This is far from a simple case of Ubuntu
ignoring the absence of XDMCP support; Ubuntu in fact held off the
transition to the current upstream version of GDM for several releases until
it had a feature set comparable to the previous version. Indeed, for XDMCP
we /had/ planned to provide the old gdm implementation in parallel as a
gdm-2.20 package, but owing to a miscommunication, this package was removed
before the 10.04 release. :/

If support for XDMCP in gdm in future releases of Ubuntu is of concern to
you, the most certain way to ensure this is by talking to the GDM upstream
developers and make your needs known.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
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