Mixing tarballs and RPMs

[jlh geodesic com]

There is a very serious bug when people try to switch
from the RedHat 6.0 rpm gnome to any gnome library
that one compiles from tarballs.   The gnome panel, the
incons, the menu and the applications get horribly messed
up.

For example, I have a default RedHat 6.0 installation, which
was running gnome just fine.  I downloaded only two tarballs,
the latest gnome-libs and the latest gnome-core, and compiled
and installed them to the default /usr/local destination.  Next,
I 'rpm -e --nodeps' each of those libraries, and their development
components, and ldconfig'd the new libs.

The screen is now a mess.  All of icons are messed up, because
gnome does not know to look to /usr/local/share for the pixmaps.
Some of these can be fixed by hand, others not.  Many of the
applications can no longer be found, for example, gnome-terminal
does not show up in the menu.  When I create a new account,
the '.gnome*' directories are created with bad information.

At the very least, there should be some information about how to
switch from an RPM to tarball based distribution, and I don't mean
by removing all RPMs and starting from scratch.  It should not be
that difficult to upgrate a single gnome component.

However, I would also like to fix the current problem.  Is there a
magic tarball that makes the .gnome directories in sync with the
latest gnome-libs/core?  Should I just remove all the tarballs I've
installed and reinstall the RedHat RPMs?

Any advice is appreciated.  Thanks,

John