dm-tool: `add-seat` poorly documented

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
bash, c
Domain
cli, documentation

Research direction

Start with the dm-tool(1) man page and its Bash completion entry, then inspect the cited src/display-manager-service.c:229 call to understand the deprecation. Document what TYPE means for add-seat, note the deprecation, and remove add-seat from Bash completion; verify the resulting man page and completion behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi. This was reported on Debian BTS.

The code and the error message suggest that the AddSeat() method is deprecated. What's more is that dm-tool(1) doesn't explain what arguments are expected when running dm-tool add-seat.

So, there seems to be two closely related issues:

  1. add-seat TYPE isn't explained at all. It's not obvious what TYPE refers to here.
  2. Its deprecation isn't documented in the man page.

Considering that https://github.com/canonical/lightdm/blob/de09f2c34175b44e12c4a49c87905812576f9661/src/display-manager-service.c#L229
is always called whenever AddSeat() is invoked, I think it'd be best to mention its deprecation in the man page and drop add-seat from Bash completion.

Dominant language
C
Stars
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Forks
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PR merge metrics
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