Any thoughts on these changes?

[Nathan Murphy]

I have been running Redhat KDE packages for 3.1 for
some time now.  Yes, they jumped the gun a bit for
their packages, but they have created very useful
builds based on the added experience.  I for one
really enjoy having all the XScreensavers built into
KDE.  

However, the most recent build in Rawhide, 3.1-9, have
removed the standard Konqueror splash screen and
replaced it with a Redhat screen with product and
registration links all over it and no easy way to
reset it.  They have again removed the "About KDE"
option under help.  The font system has been tweaked
to use the standard fonts for Gnome (this causing all
sorts of rendering oddities at many sites).  

Now some of these issues really might be resolved
before Redhat 8.1, but honestly I think some were
intentional.  I really think Redhat should be lauded
for finally spending serious effort on producing KDE
packages, but some of their choices are irrational. 
Why doesn't Mozilla get an unchangable Redhat
advertisement homepage like Konqueror?  Why isn't the
"About Gnome" obfuscated more thoroughly?

I recognize that it isn't exactly the responsibility
of the KDE developers to police distrobutions and that
the KDE group for this reason only releases official
source tarballs.  It is however, I think, important
that the leaders of the KDE community maintain open
dialog with distrobutions with the expectation that
distrobutions would provide compelling reasons for
alterations to the KDE codebase and the associated
results.      

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