[GLLUG] Redhat 8.0 + holy crap.

Jo jo@groupinfo.com
Wed, 2 Oct 2002 11:52:35 -0400


On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 11:44:55AM -0400, Basher584 wrote:
> 
> Of coarse the code is ugly, they are C developers! :)  I am sure it will get better over time.

  But they /could/ have worked with the KDE people who actually know
the code and could do it nicely.
 
> >   RedHat has of course a perfect right to do all of this, and there is
> > some argument for a unified desktop, but hostile forks are generally
> > considered a Bad Thing in the free software world and RedHat's made
> > absolutely no effort to 'play nice' with the KDE people over unification.
> > It doesn't help that RedHat refused to ship KDE until fairly recently,
> > did a lot of the early Gnome funding, still employs several prominent Gnome
> > hackers, and is generally perceived by KDE folks as being pretty anti-KDE...
> 
> Um.. they have there "forked" kernel too, and that has seemed to work out well.
> There are always positive and negatives to these things.  Not sure if there is such a thing as a "hostile" fork.

  There most certainly is! The forked kernel is a little different - it's
run by Alan Cox, who's well respected in the Linux kernel community, and
the aim is to produce good code that will be fed back into the main codebase.
It's also done in consultation with Linus and with the main Linux mailing
list. An equivalent would be RedHat hiring, say, Reggie Stadlbauer or Don
Sanders and having him work with the KDE core developers to make the
changes they want. Getting some of the top Gnome people to hack around on
their own KDE fork is definitely not friendly.
 
> They did a lot of early Gnome funding because of licensing issues with QT.

  I'm well aware of that. I was first trying to create a GPL clone of Qt,
then employed by Trolltech, at the time. Once Qt went GPL they could
have treated the desktop environments equally, however, as Debian does now.
My understanding is RedHat 8 doesn't even give you an option to select a
KDE desktop at install time now, you get Gnome and have to do the
switchdesk thing to get at KDE.

> In general I don't see redhat as anti-kde, they are pro-gnome, but they aren't trying to hinder KDE directly.  The only thing that is sad about the whole situation is it will take time to find another kde person to replace Bero.
>

  They'll have trouble finding a KDE person when they show no willingness
to work with the KDE developers.

> What I want to know is why anybody (kde,redhat,independents,etc) haven't made a script to change back to standard KDE? Hmm. SRPMS (ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/kde/stable/3.0.3/RedHat/limbo/SRPMS/), shouldn't be to hard.
> 

  Script? RedHat have made KDE library chances. The 'script' would basically
be 'install some proper KDE RPMs'. The problem is that the people RedHat
are targetting don't know how to do that - but /do/ know how to file KDE
bug reports against RedHat's modified KDE, which the KDE people will then
be expected to fix.