Re: Where to get latest versions of programs

[Rebecca Ore <rebecca ore op net>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 12:26:05PM -0800, Scott Tyson wrote:
> Thanks to all who replied. I don't like to compile much at all.  :).  Is
> most gnome software released as RPMs?  

Despite what you might think, it's really not hard to ./configure; make.
Most of the time, the tarballs work very well.  When they don't, it's
normally because part of the latest cvs stuff hasn't been packaged yet.
That will get you if you try building packages instead, too.  If you
have disk space, try setting up a directory /opt/gnome (add
/opt/gnome/libs and /opt/gnome/bin to the appropriate /etc configuration
files (more details if you need them).

If I understand correctly (haven't tried it at home because disk space
is minimimal), you can keep the source trees and do "make uninstall" to
remove earlier installations.  The advantage of compiling is that you
can try patches as soon as someone posts them, and edit files if someone
suggests a bug fix that way (helped tremendously with the recent
gnome-core 0.99.3, thanks, which did work against the previous
control-panel though with some symtoms).

I generally use tkdesk to unpack the tarball, but open an xterm to do
the actual configuring and compiling.  Tkdesk will also apply patches
though the command line for that isn't terribly hairy.  I expect that
gmc has or will have similiar tools; I'm just used to tkdesk.

-- 
Rebecca Ore