compiling from tarballs

[Todd Wilson <twilson csufresno edu>]

Please pardon me if this is a stupid question, but I couldn't find an
explanation in the FAQ or Getting Started pages.  I have a RH 6.1
system and have been wanting to use some of the recent releases
announced on this list -- e.g., gnumeric-0.46.  When I go to the RH
Package Installation page at www.gnome.org, I find that the version
there is gnumeric-0.38.  Vaguely remembering it being said that recent
releases are only available in tarball, I go to the Installation from
Tarball page, and, indeed, gnumeric-0.46 is there.  When I go to
install it, I find that I need libglade-0.11.  Fair enough; I download
and install that first.  When gnumeric's configure complains again
that my libglade is still too old, I go back and find an instruction
on the download page that implies that I have to remove the libglade
package that came with my distribution first.  When I try to do this,
of course, I get a message about many broken dependencies.

My question:  Does this mean that I'm basically going to have to
remove most of my gnome packages, re-install them from tarball, do
something to my /etc/ld.so.conf, and possibly other stuff just to try
out one program (gnumeric-0.46)?  Or, possibly, that I'm either going
to have to go all tarball or all RPM, not a mixture of both?  Is there
a document that I haven't seen that explains this in some detail (/usr
vs. /usr/local, gnome-config getting confused, etc.)?

Related question:  I also vaguely remember it being said that the
process of producing RPMs from tarballs is not very complicated, but
that, because developers understandably didn't want to be in the RPM
business, there was bound to be some lag time before they get produced
(eight releases worth, in the case of gnumeric).  Is there any reason
why scripts cannot be written that will create the necessary RPMs
automatically from the tarballs and place the resulting files in the
ftp area, so as to eliminate this lag time?  Or, more likely, am I
completely misunderstanding the situation?

Happy New Millenium!

-- 
Todd Wilson
Computer Science Department
California State University, Fresno