This is almost a no-win situation. Would the community accept us not allowing modules to depend on e.g. dbus and hal cvs starting in gnome 2.17? It'd really be a lot nicer to just depend on the distributor versions of these modules for many reasons.
I think it would make a lot of sense to treat freedesktop modules as external dependencies and modify the gnome moduleset to pull in tarballs instead of cvs versions of them. Matthias