Re: General GNOME User docs

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 07:05:57PM -0700 or thereabouts, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 30, 2000 at 09:02:52PM -0400, Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> 
> > > Finally: I'd like to include my pet project,  "If you are new to
> > > Linux.." doc (which was an appendix to UG in 1.2) in the new
> > > documentation package as well - if people think it is worth it. My
> > > wife seems to appreciate this kind of "newbies" documentation. 
[snip response]
> 
> I have some political objections to this.  Linux is NOT the only OS that
> GNOME runs on.  Right this instant, it's probably bigger than all of the
> others combined, but shipping GNOME with Solaris et al has the potential to
> change that.  I doubt that anything else will weight in as heavily as Linux,
> but they can certainly make it so that Linux has less than 50% of the GNOME
> desktops.  I think we should leave this up to the people who actually
> distribute GNOME, so that they can include one that's specific for their
> operating environment.  SGI can include one for IRIX, Sun one for Solaris,
> Debian one for Debian, RedHat one for RedHat.  Comments?

Greg has a very good point here. And commands work differently enough
that a Linux-only document could do bad things if, say, you describe
'killall' in Linux terms and a Solaris user sees it and tries it :)

There are ways to include it in a tarball but not to include it in
the building unless it's specifically asked for, aren't there? Isn't
that the kind of thing ./configure can check for?

Telsa