Differences between default Gnome and Fedora

[Havoc Pennington]

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 12:42, Steven Garrity wrote:
> I've been wondering about what Fedora does differently in the Gnome 
> desktop than default Gnome. I'm not in a position to be able to easily 
> install both to compare (I just have Fedora Core 1 installed).
> 
> I'm wondering what differences there are - and why. I would like to see 
> some discussion as to the value of each/any differences - is it worth 
> keeping different - and if so, is it worth looking at upstreaming to Gnome.
> 
> I'm thinking of stuff like the dock/quicklaunch area and the 
> fedora/start menu, etc.
> 

You can find the differences by reviewing the patches in the spec files.
The differences are essentially:

 a) changes to default configuration, including theme
 b) bugfixes not upstream yet or backported from unreleased 
    versions of GNOME

AFAIK all the differences from upstream are
minor/cosmetic/configuration, rather than meaningful code or
functionality modifications.

The reason for a) is that we want to have a unique Red Hat appearance
that spans various apps and desktops. Also, sometimes upstream has a
config option that is explicitly intended to be set up to match how a
distribution works. For example, the "adjust date and time" command for
the panel clock.

The reason for b) is that the release cycle of GNOME does not sync to
our release cycle, so we need to apply fixes and maintain freezes on our
schedule. Without doing this we could not effectively create a stable
release, because we could not control/monitor changes during a freeze.

There are probably some random patches that should be upstream and
aren't, but typically there's no rationale there, just stuff slipping
through the cracks. If you want to go through and look for patches like
this please do, others have done so in the past and it was very helpful.

Havoc