Differences between upstream and the Fedora package
===================================================
* All files are installed according to the FHS. Relatively complete
environment as provided by upstream may be found in %{fbroot}
* Firebird utilities gbak,gsec,gfix,nbackup and gstat have a symlink in /usr/bin
In /usr/bin you have also fbsql symlinked to Firebird isql.
We can't name it isql to avoid conflict with isql from UNIX-ODBC
* According to Fedora packaging rules, for SuperServer, firebird service is not started
automatically. You need to start it, as root :
service firebird start.
If you wanted to have Firebird started at each boot, as root :
chkconfig --level 345 firebird on
* Fedora packages do not use, nor contain the pre-supplied sources for
libicu. Fedora packages are used instead.
* POSSIBLE INCOMPATIBILITY
In incides on text-based columns (CHRA/VARCHAR), Firebird uses ICU to get
binary-comparable sequences (collations). These collations may be different
in different ICU versions.
In Firebird 2.1 upstream always uses the bundled ICU library. Firebird packages
use the Firebird-packaged libicu*. Unfortunately, this may lead to
incompatibilities in the binary index representation (on disk) between
databases created by Fedora-packaged Firebird, and upstream.
This can also lead to incompatibilities when the Firebird packages are
re-built using different version of the system-wide ICU library
One way to fix this is to backup and restore all databases created with ICU
version different from the one currently installed on the system. Another is
to re-generate all indices that contain a text-based columns.