slim should remember previous session (or have a default session)
A fork of the SLiM "Simple Login Manager"
Brought to you by:
bdt-rob
Menu
▾
▴
#1 slim should remember previous session (or have a default session)
This request was logged on the Debian bug system as #426211 against v1.2.6
The situation regarding "default session" is a bit of a mess.
* Versions that early allowed a list of sessions, just by name, and that name was passed to the session start script. The comments in the config file said the first one would be the default. In reality, the default was to pass an empty string, and the example script (as ~/.xinitrc) defined what the default was.
* Later, the code was changed to specify only a directory, and the sessions were all the valid files found therein. This meant the order became unpredictable, and also that a blank string would likely no longer work. The code was changed to always pick one, and to always show that on the login screen.
* The Gentoo maintainers patched their version to allow both forms of configuration, and to remove the call to pick one, so that the login screen would not always have the text shown. Their session script retained support for empty strings.
* On a failed login, the code currently blanks out the session selection. As I've picked up the Gentoo patches, this is not causing me a problem but it's a bit daft.
It would be good to sort this out - do default sessions in some sensible way, allow the config to determine whether the selected session is always shown, allow the session to persist over (failed) logins (probably with configuration option to control that).
There is a patch in the Guix package which fixes the failed login issue, although it would not apply since r20
There are, in fact, two very good reasons to leave the default behaviour as it currently is:
Leaving the default selection blank means the .xinitrc or equivalent script can pick up a default from the logged-in user's home directory.