Building ab initio

[Nathan Torkington <gnat frii com>]

What fun I'm having.  I have a naked FreeBSD system that I'm trying to
build GNOME on.  I decided to do this after being all fired up by
Miguel's inspirational talk at Usenix.

I grabbed the 980622 snapshots and have been attempting to build all
afternoon.  First, I'll tell you what I've done so that (a) something
is in the mailing list archives for future FreeBSD builders, and (b)
you can tell me if I've got old versions of these things.  Then I'll
ask questions.

Here's what I've installed (in the order I installed them):

 - autoconf-2.12
 - automake-1.3
 - gettext-0.10
 - gmp-2.0.2
 - gsl-0.3b
 - guile-1.2
 - imlib-1.4
 - libtool-1.0h
 - glib-SNAP-980622
 - gtk+-SNAP-980622
 - mico-SNAP-980622 
   (I had to comment out line 1404 of idl/scanner.cc to get it
   to compile.  I'm running GNU Bison 1.25)
 - FreeBSD package netpbm-94.3.1
 - FreeBSD package jpeg-6a
 - FreeBSD package tiff-3.4
 - FreeBSD package png-1.0.1

Now my questions:

1) FTP Site

What's up with ftp.gnome.org?  It only has tarballs for a couple of
old versions.  The directory is now /pub/GNOME not /pub/gnome (as it
has been published in, for example, the Usenix proceedings).  I had
to grab sources from jimpick.com.  Should ftp.gnome.org be the one
carrying the snapshots?  Or at least contain a full snapshot.

2) Web Site

The FAQ and other sources say to get the files through anon CVS, which
no longer works.  There's nothing on the web site that says "hey,
dumbass, we turned anon CVS off.  Surprise!"

3) Building Problem

When I try to run autogen.sh in gnome-libs (again from the 980622
snapshot), I get:

gnat@coprolith (gnome-libs) sh autogen.sh 
.: Can't open ./macros/autogen.sh

What am I missing?

Thanks,

Nat