comment on Gnome installation/compiling/debugging

[atai ece ucsd edu (Andy Tai)]

Hi, I find the following comment in slashdot by an AC. But I think it has good
points, so repost it here:

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There is a slight issue here. 
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04, @03:09AM 

For one, the developers and debuggers of gnome have all been compiling
and making the latest gnome packages from cvs. In order for this to work, 
they have their systems tuned perfectly. ie. All the right packages are 
installed, dependency problems are already corrected, etc, etc. They read 
the mailing lists and understand what changes suddenly may appear or 
what may break. The developers are living on a different plane than the 
average user, it's inevitable. 

The problem is the average user is not doing all that. For example, 
to compile the latest gnome packages libtool-1.2d is needed. Now I 
just checked a bunch of faq's on gnome, and no where is that mentioned. 
There is also a version of make or autoconf that is required that is in 
the gnu alpha ftp site, No where is that mentioned in the faq's. 

These library problems are going to cause major headaches for the 
developers because 10,000 newbies are gonna be asking "HOW DO I INSTALL 
GNOME???" 

They could have saved themselves the trouble of all this and 
prepared better documentation, unfortunately some of these faq's are 
getting out of date :( 

on a side note, Gnome works great for me, been running gnome-session for 
5 days 11 hours 52 minutes with no crashes. GMC has a few bugs, but 
Miguel has been diligent in stomping them out, kudos to you Miguel. 
-- 

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