Re: Newby question - GNOME from source w/ existing gtk

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Steve Jorgensen">

> Here are some reasons I thought I should install from source, but feel free 
> to shoot them down.  I'm not worried about being wrong.
> 
> 1.  I would understand more about how Gnome is put together.

Possibly worthwhile, but if you're an application developer, you're much
better off spending your time in that highly valuable area. We have great
apps, but more is always better. ;)

[ If you're a desktop hacker, or platform hacker, then you do need to know
lots about how it all fits together. ]

> 2.  When I first became interested in gASQL, the new development was in
> Gnome 1.4, and it was very hard to get that in binary on any distribution
> I wanted to use.  Mandrake finally came out with it, and Mandrake's not
> terrible, but I decided they stick too close to the bleeding edge to be
> practical.  So I figured the best solution to avoid running into the same
> wall in the future would be to know how to build whatever version I want
> from source at any time.

What are you planning to build on right now? Everyone's recommending that
new code should be written for the 2.0 platform, so in that case, you will
need to build from source. The vicious-build-scripts are a fast track to
having the current GNOME 2.0 CVS work running.

If you're still building for 1.4, the fast track is using existing packages
from your distribution.

> What if every stable version of Gnome had an identical copy with a
> different major version number and different file names for everything.
> It could be sort of like the Linux kernel numbering scheme.  Then you
> could have parallel GNOMEs for production and development, and not have to
> worry about clashes.  You could have duplicates of absolutely anything.

It's easy enough just to build GNOME into a sandboxed area, such as a
different user's home directory. Versioning is hard enough already. ;)

- Jeff

-- 
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