rawhide report: 20050121 changes

[Rahul Sundaram]

Hi

> 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.
> 

nobody is proposing to *ignore* KDE. we are talking about moving KDE
into extras. nobody is questioning the importance of KDE nor is
anybody stating that KDE is not good software.
 



> 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.

its both in the users interest as well as in the interest of fedora
project for having fedora *core* only provide the default stuff



> 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).

if fedora installer (anaconda) provides a option to install stuff from
extras and if a subset of fedora extras including KDE is provided as
ISO images, would that satisfy you?



> 
> 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.

they also had to suffer a lot of flames for doing this. see
kde-redhat.sf.net for an effort to provide upstream packages removing
the redhat integration bits.

also, one of the integration efforts was moving the gnome panel to the
bottom. this has already been reverted to the upstream default. so
fedora is already moving in the direction of having upstream supply
whatever integration is required. if you are interested then take a
look at freedesktop.org. thats where integration work belongs and
*not* just redhat


> 
> 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.

you are over dramatising this. again if anaconda and kickstart
provides an easy way to install stuff from fedora extras this point
becomes moot IMO

> Experience tells, this won't work.

why not?. 

> > 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.

no. they wouldnt switch if making the choice is easy


> 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.

thats because suse allegedly did a poor job. someone else stepped up
to provide upstream gnome packages for GNOME

http://usr-local-bin.org/rpms/usr-local-bin.php

this is similar to the kde-redhat.sf.net effort. so instead of having
two different teams repackaging the same thing, we invite the
kde-redhat.sf.net team and others to step up and maintain the packages
in fedora extras by staying close to upstream


-- 
Regards,
Rahul Sundaram