From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020310 Description of problem: Often one configures a network to share home directories, and often not all of the computers run the same version of linux. If a user logs into a 7.2 machine, his configuration updates to gnome 1.4. If that user then tries to log into a 7.0 or 7.1 machine, the user's settings no longer work, and the user must clear his .gnome directory and start over. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Share a home directory between a 7.2 machine and a 7.0 machine 2.Clear the .gnome directory 3.Log in to the 7.0 machine with gnome 4.Log in to the 7.2 machine with gnome 5.Log in to the 7.0 machine. You will see that the configuration has been corrupted. Actual Results: Configuring the gnome-1.4 damaged the configuration so it wouldn't work under 1.2 Expected Results: Either the configurations should be compatible, or gnome 1.2 and 1.4 should use separate directories (e.g. .gnome-1.2 and .gnome-1.4) to store configuration information. This problem also occurred with 1.0 and 1.2, and may also occur with 2.0 unless it is fixed. Additional info:
We are trying to fix for 2.0. The problem is that making this work involves carefully monitoring all changes to config data and formats; so it's more an education thing for all the open source developers involved than anything else. Anyhow, there is no way to retroactively fix for 1.x, so closing the bug report; consider the point duly noted, though, and a best effort is being made to put process in place to avoid this issue.