I was genuinely surprised that the diff was so small. It's a sign of a a well written and factored system. In more average codebases big changes like that would likely require changes in multiple places and also cascade changes to related modules.
Finally someone who understands the beauty of this instead of "my favourite DE is ..."!
This, coupled with the detailed explanation and rationale for the change, the explicit deadline, seems to me like an exemplar of good practice for free software community projects. It is not surprising that this came at a time when Debian is also discussing init systems, and hopefully the same well-thought approach will work there too. And that matters not just for Debian but for all distros IMHO, because it sets a precedent of how you do these things without fucking up your userbase and/or your developers.
Absolutely. I'm an openbox guy, though I have used XFCE and see it as a more sensible choice for a lot of somewhere-between-here-and-gnome users; that said, this kind of support for minimalist desktop systems would be a huge step in, if not the "right" direction (because that's a religious war), at least one that introduces users to a whole lot of flexibility they didn't know they didn't have.
Lots of people do this to run IE as the desktop shell and lock the entire machine down by simply setting the shell as "iexplore.exe -k www.mysite.com" and setting up some group policy items. One Kiosk set up.
To be honest, I would be genuinely afraid to use distro where patch to switch default desktop environment is much bigger than that. In ideal world, changing defaults should be one line change.
