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,and nbackup have a symlink in /usr/bin
  In /usr/bin you have also isql-fb symlinked to Firebird isql.
  We can't name it isql to avoid conflict with isql from UNIX-ODBC
  In /usr/bin you have also gstat-fb symlinked to Firebird gstat.
  We can't name it gstat to avoid conflict with gstat from Ganglia-gmond

* According to Fedora packaging rules, firebird service is not started 
  automatically. You need to start it, as root : 
  for SuperServer :  
    service firebird start
  for Classic :  
    chkconfig firebird on
  If you wanted to have firebird Superserver 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 (CHAR/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.