Comment 31 for bug 133635

Gareth:

> You will forgive me if I'm a little confused.
> I know xprop, and I know roughly what X cookies are .. this doesn't sound like a "major" fix.

Well, for LTSPFS, it wasn't that major.

The problem, at the time, was that LDM, the display manager, had no method for us to call out any external process to set the xprop, or do any of the plumbing necessary to "make the magic happen", so the change to LTSPFS also required a rewite to LDM, and some other bits as well. At the time, it effectively became "a new version"

> Really ?!

Well, assuming "an infinite number of monkeys :)", we probably could have done it. The problem was, at that point we really only had 3 developers actively working on the code, and only 1 (myself) well versed in C. After all the work that had been done to rewrite LDM in C, it would have meant, in parallel, rewriting a Python version as well, and we were stretched a bit too thin.

> Given LTSP seems to be the cornerstone of EdUbuntu I'm a little gobsmacked that firstly nobody else spotted the issue > and secondly it was deemed low priority.

Since previous versions of LTSP had no security to speak of either, I can only suggest that this was considered a long standing problem, and "no different than the current state of affairs". None of us who work on LTSP are professional programmers who do It for a living, as LTSP isn't like Mozilla or Ubuntu: it generates no income, and is a completely volunteer, "for the love of it" organization. The fault that there was no security is purely upstreams.

> Incidentally, one of the reasons this issue "rubs" is that I've "had" to upgrade to Intrepid to obtain fixes for stuff that
> isn't being backported to Hardy, unfortunately Intrepid currently has more holes than a sieve, random desktop logouts
> for no apparent reason and random screen lock-ups being two specific issues .. it seems like I'm forever chasing my
> tail just to get something that's stable.

Are these LTSP related problems? If so, I'd be happy to help.

I'm away on Business 'till Thursday, but if you'd like to pop by either #ltsp or #edubuntu on freenode, I'm always more than happy to help debug problems. I'm sbalneav in the channels, both on freenode.

Cheers,
Scott