Why Gnome RPMS need to work with RH 5.2

[Eric Kidd <eric kidd pobox com>]

[My apologies to users of non-RH distributions. You can skip this message,
because you aren't affected by these problems. If you wish, you can gloat.]

It's pretty clear by now that the latest Gnome RPMS don't work well with
Red Hat Linux 5.2. There seem to be two real problems:

 1) The RPMS are out of date.
 2) The RPMS are linked against glibc2.1, which is part of RH 5.9,
    not RH 5.2 (the current stable version).

An obvious fix for (2) would be upgrading to the glibc2.1 packages from
Starbuck. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like software compiled for
glibc2.1 works well with glibc2.0.

Some of us *need* to stick with glibc2.0. In my case, I prepare binaries
and RPMS for a couple of projects, and need to test against the shipping
version of RH. Other users may not want to upgrade their systems to 5.9.

Now, the good folks at RHAD labs are presumably aware of this problem by
now. I can only assume that either (1) they're really short on time or (2)
they don't care whether RH 5.2 users have a good experience with Gnome, and
officially recommend that everyone upgrade to Starbuck first.

So, is there anybody else out there who can't upgrade to RH 5.9 (or switch
to Debian), but still wants a working Gnome? Is there anybody who wishes
that the RPMS weren't quite so out-of-date?

If you fall into these categories--and you know how to make RPM packages--
would you be interested in helping to build an alternative set of Gnome
RPMS? If so, contact me via private e-mail.

Cheers,
Eric