documentation and distro-specific patches

[Alexander Kirillov <kirillov math sunysb edu>]

Hi guys:
I think we should try to find a way of dealing with the following
problem. Our docs describe "plain gnome" - as it is in the tarballs from
gnome.org. However, few users use them: most use GNOME included in the
distribution, some use ximian gnome. For most apps differences are
negligible. But in some case, they are large - e.g., RedHat patched
Nautilus quite a bit. The one which really annoyed me is menu structure
and menu editing. RedHat, Mandrake, and Ximian all seriously changed
menu structure - so much so that all the advice, e.g., given in GNOME
admin guide about menu editing becomes useless. In RH 9, menu editing is
disabled by default, and there are no vfolder files in
/etc/gnome-vfs-2.0 - instead, all menu structure is described in
/etc/X11/desktop-menus/. Took me some time to figure it all out - and I
am no newbie. And after installin Ximian Desktop 2, I still haven't
found a way to add Ximian's "System" menu from the menu panel to the
main GNOME menu -as I want to get rid of menu panel for good. 

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to deal with it? Of course
GNOME admin guide can not document all these various approaches. Maybe
we should politely tell distributors that they need to change the docs
if they change the setup so much as to make the docs useless. Or anyone
has a better idea?

In the long run, this situation suggests that menu structure needs
serious work if none of the major distributors is happy with the
existing one - maybe this should be discussed in freedesktop.org.

To those who go to GUADEC: could you raise this point in your talk and
in private discussions with developers? This seems like a good place to
do it...`

And if someone can tell me how to add "system" menu of Ximian to main
menu, so that I do not need to waste another hour sorting through all
this, I'd appreciate it. 

Sasha