Gnome 2.15.4 is broken

["Elijah Newren" <newren gmail com>]

As per suggestion at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-June/msg00071.html,
here's some loud complaining about 2.15.4 brokenness (taken from an
email from Vincent, except I've added some new notes and probably made
things much less polite in the process).  Slipping the release is
looking likely.

+ Vincent reports yet-another problem with iso-codes to add to the
  huge list we've dealt with over the past year or so.  Do we really
  need to depend on this module?  It's caused nothing but problems
  for about as long as we've used it.  Vincent's notes: "I still have
  a compiling issue in iso-codes, but I fix this by changing the
  lines causing an error to:
    p = make_parser(["drv_libxml2"])"

+ No new release of pygtk has been made and the most recent one does
  not build with GTK+ 2.10.0.  This prevents building much of 2.15.4
  right now (e.g. gnome-vfs depends on it through avahi); jdahlin on
  irc said he'd be tackling this; see also
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=347185.

+ we need a patch for gnopernicus or ship with 1.0.4:
  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341942.  This was fixed
  in cvs but that doesn't help a release without a tarball.

+ The most recent gnome-system-tools & system-tools-backends tarball
  releases _still_ depend on perl-net-dbus.  This was discussed a few
  months ago (on r-t but not d-d-l) and Carlos said he'd make the
  dependency optional rather than propose it as a blessed dependency;
  since it hasn't happened, all gnome-2.15.x releases have shipped
  with the old 2.14.x tarballs.  We're getting close to the point
  that using gnome-system-tools-2.15.x even if the dependency is
  optional would be considered to break feature freeze and thus won't
  be used.

+ gnome-session requires a new gnome-control-center. New
  gnome-control-center means that we should use libxklavier 2.91. Which
  means that we need a new gnome-applets release. Yay for API changes
  :-)
  (AFAIK, maintainers are rolling tarballs for gnome-control-center
  and gnome-applets now)

+ looks like we'll need a new gnome-mag release since LT_VERSION is
  wrong (Frederic knows more about this)

There are many tarballs that have been released after the deadline. I
can't give a figure since **the archives are still broken**...
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/ftp-release-list/2006-July/thread.html



Thanks for all your hard work everyone.  Sorry for the overly ranty
tone; any help in getting 2.15.4 into buildable, dogfoodable,
releaseable state will be very much appreciated.  :)

Elijah