rawhide report: 20050121 changes

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Sat, 2005-01-22 at 09:37 -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-01-22 at 16:09 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> > Hi
> > 
> > > >
> > > > no. fvwm2 is not a typical DE.
> > > X+fvwm2 had been the Linux standard desktop environment for many, many
> > > years and is still being used by more folks that you might assume.
> > 
> > its not the default DE nor part of fedora at all now. 
> 
> No, it's not and I'm not advocating that it should be.  It was just a
> "devils advocate" type of statement.
Right.

Besides this, those who'll need it will know how to install it.

> > > Despite some folke here don't seem to get tired to reiterate this idea,
> > > I have to object: That won't be better, It's naive to move KDE out of
> > > Core.
> > 
> > I dont see any technical objections here
> 
> That's because it's not always a technical issue.  It's about choice.
Partially yes.

But it's also a technical, a management and a political issue.

Whether RH or Gnome folks like it or not, it is a matter of fact that
KDE is a Linux Core technology, which can't be ignored by anybody,
comprising Fedora and RH.

Moving KDE to Extras would mean to close out any KDE application from
Core. From a user's perspective this can't be in anybody's interest.
Technically this would raise a lot of problems, esp. for KDE users (E.g.
there would not be any konqueror, kdm until you get Fedora Extras).

RH wants FE to be the a technology preview platform for their products.
To achieve a better desktop integration they will have to take the lead
in their desktop integration. IMO, until now, they did a pretty good job
on that. Compare RH/Fedora's KDE/Gnome interaction with that of other
distributions, and you'll probably understand what I am referring to.

If RH moves KDE out of Core, this will set a "bad" political signal,
which probably will be interpreted as "RH declaring war on KDE".
This can't be in anybody's interest.

Another aspect I consider to be naive is users believing into the
community being able to provide "better KDE packages" than RH does.
Experience tells, this won't work.

> Now that's not to say that all the non-base KDE packages have to be
> included with Core.  I could see having kdegames, kdepim, kdemultimedia,
> etc all in Extras.  Same goes for the non-base GNOME packages as well.
Fully agreed. One should try to reduce the number of desktop (both KDE
and Gnome) *applications* in Core and move them to Extras.

E.g. I would not be opposed to moving mozilla, thunderbird, evolution,
openoffice, {k,x,g}<sometools> to Extras, but their infrastructure
should remain in Core.

> If there isn't a desktop environment choice in the Core ISOs, then
> people will either deal with it, or switch to a different distro.
> Personally, I'd rather see more people come to Fedora.
Exactly. Feeling disattracted from SuSE's Gnome integration was one of
the main reasons, why I decided to switch to using RHL-8.0 after having
used SuSE for ca. 8 years.

Now I don't want to see Fedora falling into the same trap as SuSE did. 

Ralf