-> gdm

gdmsetup has been removed during the rewrite of GDM that happened in the 2.22 and 2.24 release cycles, but it might come back. Moving to gdm.

I can certainly understand rewriting a feature. However, I do not understand how a feature that was "working" for a very long time can be just yanked without providing an alternative causing a _huge_ known regresion without the rewrite being ready to replace?

What software development model is this? And it's already 2.24.0 and it is _still_ not ready?? And it _might_ come back??

Well, how do I now have the same gdm theme in my F9 box?

Rewriting GDM is a huge amount of work, and gdmsetup is (unfortunately) a bit lower priority than many other features.  Since many users like to use this, it is hard to imagine it will be long before someone invests some time to rewrite
something like it.

Note that gdmsetup always had a long-standing security issue.  You really should not run GUI programs as root, and the old gdmsetup required running itself as root.  It really only needed root privilege to write to the configuration files.  So it is good to rewrite it and fix this problem.  The GUI part of the program should run as the "gdm" user much like the other GDM GUI programs.

Since most configuration options of interest to modify are GUI related and now stored in the "gdm" users GConf directory, there might not be a real need for a gdmsetup program to need root privilege anymore.  Still, it would be best if gdmsetup could be rewritten so it no longer needs to run via sudo-like programs.

So, rewriting this is long overdue.  Since the rest of GDM is being rewritten, now seems a good time.

Thanks and I completely understand the reasons for rewriting.

What I don't get is yanking a feature without having an alternative ready or better yet a plan on when it will be integrated back. 

If security was a concern, like you mentioned, a hack to write the config files as root and drop privileges to a non-privileged user would have sufficed _until_ the rewrite was ready for integration. 

Removing of a feature shouldn't have been passed in the first place since it is a huge regression. GDM greeter is the first thing a users sees and removing that doesn't make very many happy.

I still haven't heard on how to install gdm themes even manually or is it even possible now? It's been a year since that feature was removed and since I here a _might_ be integrated in the future, this is as good as dead for a while.

This bug report is very confusing.  The subject of the bug seems to be that gdmsetup is missing, however you seem to mostly want to discuss the fact that gdmgreeter and its XML themes are also no longer supported in the new GDM.
It might be best to close this bug and open two new bugs that more clearly explain the two separate issues.  It confuses things to talk about multiple issues in the same report.

Also note that the GNOME release team did not agree with your assessment that gdmsetup or gdmgreeter themes were significant regressions, thus they accepted GDM 2.24 into GNOME 2.24.  Also note that when this was discussed in the GDM 2.21 timeframe, most distro release-team representatives concurred that these features were not blockers for a rewrite.

If you have issues with the release-team's decision, I would raise the issue on their mailing list, release-team@gnome.org.  Also, talking on the GDM list gdm-list@gnome.org would be a good place.  A bug report is useful for tracking the work to reimplement these features, but is not likely to get much immediate attention.  The mailing lists would be a better place to discuss if you are looking for response in the near term.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 587750 ***