Re: documentation and distro-specific patches

[Pat Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

Sasha said, with some justification: 

> 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, 

I mentioned the distro-documentation issue in my presentation to the GUADEC 4 
developer conference. Nobody took the bait, but at least the issue is out in the 
open. 

Pat