I read Richard Johnson's post about Canonical and Kubuntu and just want to offer one correction:
When the Gnome side of our community, whether they are Canonical or not, come up with an idea such as bullet proof x, printer configuration, Compiz support stuff, and so on, they never come to the Kubuntu people and say, “Hey, we are working on project x for Ubuntu and was wondering if you all thought that something like this would be good for Kubuntu, how about lending a developer to the project so we can work side-by-side.”
Regarding bulletproof-x, in fact I did work to involve KDE in the development from the earliest discussions. I had wanted it to work on both GNOME and KDE (I am not a "GNOME side of the community" - Xorg spans both), however while gdm had hooks to allow adding a failsafe server, kdm did not. I brought this issue to the attention of Riddell and other Kubuntu developers at UDS in Spain last year, but they didn't seem super interested in it (probably busy with more important things I guess). I listed the issue in the original spec, and decided to focus on getting the gdm side working (which turned out to be a big enough chore in itself). I figured if/when Kubuntu was interested in it, and had the kdm situation sorted out, they could derive from what I coded. The BPX code was placed into xorg rather than gdm (despite only working with gdm) in hopes that one day it could be made to work for both *dm's.
Indeed, I was contacted by a KDE developer after Gutsy was released, who said he was interested in working on the kdm issue, and I volunteered to help with the bpx side of things, however I've not heard back.
In fact, due to various issues getting gdm's failsafe code to work (mostly to my own mis-understanding of gdm's failsafe design intent), I ended up bypassing it entirely; bulletproof-x as implemented simply kills gdm and restarts it when done. I think it would be fairly trivial to do the same for kdm, and I'm thinking about investigating this for Hardy (I would absolutely love it if a Kubuntu person could lend a hand here - I would be happy to provide guidance on this; the task is not hard, it just takes a lot of testing time.)
The good news is, in talking with gravity from Debian about Bulletproof-X at UDS, he expressed that rather than adopt it into Debian as is, he'd like to see the capability implemented internally in Xorg itself. I also favor this idea, as it would bypass the whole *dm issue entirely and result in a much more robust solution. I'm not sure about the timing of this work, but perhaps it will be there for Hardy+1. So even if the current design remains gdm-specific for now, hopefully eventually we'll have an implementation that is desktop generic. (It would be great to have help on this, if someone is feeling ambitious and not afraid of xserver hacking.)
Aside from all this, it may also be worth noting that our displayconfig-gtk tool is designed to share KDE's guidance-backends code. I had originally envisioned that as KDE migrated its code to use xrandr, we'd be able to leverage this work and contribute to it, working side-by-side on it. Unfortunately, this hasn't come to be despite our requests for help, and we've decided to refocus efforts to build onto the GNOME screen resolution tools instead. I think we'll end up with a good solution for Ubuntu, but I'm a little disappointed in that displayconfig-gtk seemed to strike a great compromise between kde and gnome by using different front ends but sharing the same backend. But, I plan to try to push as much common Xorg config logic as possible into Xorg libraries rather than just in Gnome, in hopes that this will enable Kubuntu to more easily benefit from our efforts - they'd just need to do the frontend work. (Stay tuned - I'll post more once I have code to share.)