On 10/5/07, Ben Konrath <bkonrath@redhat.com> wrote:
On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 19:44 -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-10-03 at 18:09 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> > On 10/3/07, David Zeuthen <davidz@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > This looks pretty smooth, thanks a lot for working on this. My first
> > > reaction is that this is not something that should be limited to
> > > firstboot; ideally stuff like that should be able to run from the
> > > desktop environment when adding / deleting / managing users, right?
> >
> > We had a design session on this; the idea was actually that you could
> > create new users from the login dialog (GDM).
>
> I agree that's an interesting idea that would replace the need for a
> firstboot module (and probably firstboot entirely). However, I think
> it's still needed as a program you can launch in the desktop session
> along with an icon in System->Administration. If only we had a component
> system...

If the account creation was only in gdm, how would a user know that they
need to create an account before they login? - would this be an obvious
step?

If there are no accounts listed in the GDM user list then you'd have to create one.  GDM could even prompt for this since it knows if user accounts are present (or rather it has a blacklist of non-user accounts).  The thought was that GDM could easily make it obvious that you needed to create a user account when none existed by prompting you.  ( i.e. if (user_accounts.length == 0) { show_account_creation_dialog(); } ). 

The other reason GDM was a good entry point for creating accounts was because in (fast) user switching scenarios you will be shown the GDM screen to login as another user, if another user doesn't exist you might want to create them at that point instead of switching back to your original user and finding the system-*  dialog that allows that.

~ Bryan