RE: Newby question - GNOME from source w/ existing gtk

[Steve Jorgensen <jorgens coho net>]

On Sunday, December 09, 2001 1:59 AM, Jeff Waugh [SMTP:jdub perkypants org] 
wrote:
> <quote who="Steve Jorgensen">
>
> > Here's my issue:  I purposefully did not install GNOME or anything 
gnomish
> > since I plan to install GNOME from source, but the gtk package was 
still
> > installed.  There were too many important things dependent upon the gtk
> > package for me to reasonably omit it.
>
> You certainly don't have to build GNOME from source from the ground up 
just
> to do application development for the 1.4 platform. Grab the packages 
from
> your distribution and use them.
>
> If you want to develop for the 2.0 platform, use the 
vicious-build-scripts;
> there's a good document on how to use them here:
>
>   http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/notes/
>
> If you are *really* set on building GNOME 1.4 from source, vbs can do 
that
> too; generally you install the entire system within your (or a sandboxed
> user's) home directory, so it has no impact on the rest of the stuff
> installed on your system.

Here are some reasons I thought I should install from source, but feel free 
to shoot them down.  I'm not worried about being wrong.

1.  I would understand more about how Gnome is put together.
2.  When I first became interested in gASQL, the new development was in 
Gnome 1.4, and it was very hard to get that in binary on any distribution I 
wanted to use.  Mandrake finally came out with it, and Mandrake's not 
terrible, but I decided they stick too close to the bleeding edge to be 
practical.  So I figured the best solution to avoid running into the same 
wall in the future would be to know how to build whatever version I want 
from source at any time.

I just had a wild idea realted to this.  It's one of those grandios newby 
pronouncement types of thing, so I apologize in advance, but...

What if every stable version of Gnome had an identical copy with a 
different major version number and different file names for everything.  It 
could be sort of like the Linux kernel numbering scheme.  Then you could 
have parallel GNOMEs for production and development, and not have to worry 
about clashes.  You could have duplicates of absolutely anything.