Compiling the current development version of Dia

[dg1727 hushmail com]

Hello, 

About the virtual machine (VM) that Steffen Macke has published at 
http://dia-installer.de/developer/index.html.en :  

(Thanks to Steffen for going to the trouble to build this VM and 
make it available.)  

I think there are some users of Dia who:  

 * may need to use the current development version of Dia because 
of fixes or added features in that version; 

 * understand that the current development version may have bugs 
that are worse than in the current released version, and are 
willing to un-install & re-install to switch from one version to 
the other if needed (but hopefully not often); and 

 * for whom a VM wouldn't work because of some combination of the 
following:  

   1. their computer may be just slow enough (maybe with lots of 
applications running) that running Dia in a VM would result in the 
VM or the host OS, or both, being too slow, but running Dia in the 
host OS (with no VM) would be fast enough; 

   2. not convenient to download 1.1 GB (not everyone has a fast, 
reliable Internet connection); 

   3. might not want the VM screen to obscure windows on the host 
OS (I am not sure if resizing the VM screen frequently would be 
compatible with the window manager on the VM, or possibly even with 
Dia itself.); 

   4. (I am not sure if VMWare Player allows mapping a folder on 
the guest OS to a folder on the host OS so that files can be easily 
transferred between the two.  If not, some users might not want to 
deal with moving files between the host OS and the VM.  Even drag-
and-drop might get too tedious after a while.)  

Would it be possible for someone to publish a procedure for 
installing the required tools on a plain Ubuntu 10.10 install?  Are 
most of the required tools already available in Ubuntu, or quickly 
accessible by "apt-get" or similar?  Does the "icon to pull the 
latest Dia sources from git master and compile them" launch a shell 
script (or similar) that is a very small file and could be easily 
distributed?  

Thanks in advance for help.