Ximian 4 RH7.2 in beta?

["Lee J. Moore" <mlist strictlybritish com>]

Is Ximian Gnome for RH7.2 in beta?  I ask because I first downloaded it
three weeks ago after surviving with Gnomehide for a while.  I'd used
Ximian on RH7.1 originally after the Gnome version that shipped with it
became rather old.  Back then everything was fine.  But I upgraded to
RH7.2 and Ximian Gnome wasn't so essential for a while.  RH's 1.4
implementation (and integration into the distro) being (debatably)
better thought out.

Three weeks ago, Ximian Gnome installation was a nightmare.  Considering
RH7.2 had only just been installed on the box in question, there were
all kinds of dependency problems and the Ximian installer didn't even
seem to be aware of packages that had been downloaded (I had to install
some rpm's myself IIRC).  I dumped it.  I really wasn't impressed and
thought I'd try again a little later.

Today, I tried again, thinking the problems would've been sorted.  I
synchronized my redhat-72-i386 directory with that on the Ximian server
and downloaded the latest installer & xml files.  This time, it actually
installed without the dependency problems.  Great!

...BUT!

1) I had to delete my ~/.gnome-desktop so that I would have a usable
Trashbin, Home icon, etc.
2) Red Hat 7.2 ships with Mozilla 0.9.2.  Ximian with Mozilla 0.9.5. 
Now, RPM reports both versions existing because the Ximian installer
didn't upgrade, but freshly installed the new version (presumably with a
dodgy RPM spec file?).  The result?  Well, trying to install Galeon via
Red Carpet is funny because it tries to install Mozilla 0.9.5, despite
the fact it's already installed.  Presumably, this would go on forever
until 0.9.2 is removed, which would - incidentally - break 0.9.5 and
that would have to be reinstalled manually.  Doesn't such difficulty
rather defeat the idea of Red Carpet making installation easier?
3) Up2Date suddenly wants to update all of my Gnome packages back to the
Red Hat Gnome 1.4.  So "use Red Carpet!" somebody will say.  Well, I'm
finding it difficult to trust when considering Red Carpet can go down
for a whole day and it never used to seem synchronized with Red Hat's
critical updates when I used Ximian on RH7.1.
4) When I go to recompile rp3 (a very minimal Gnome based dialler
produced by Red Hat), it wont compile (it will on a stock RH7.2 install
without Ximian).  Notably, because Ximian has screwed up the ORBit
directories (and god knows what other header locations).  For example,
*part* of an error (there are loads of errors in this simple little
application, but hey - this message is long enough):

/usr/include/gnome-panel.h:7:23: orb/orbit.h: No such file or directory.

They should be in /usr/include/orb/ rather than
/usr/include/orbit-1.0/orb/

--
FTR, I also today installed RH7.2 on a separate machine (different proc
architecture, etc.).  This time without installing Gnome 1.4 that ships
with Red Hat and I proceeded to install Ximian Gnome again.  Exactly the
same problems occurred, ruling out any conflicts between Ximian and RH
Gnome (because RHGnome wasn't installed).

If this is the first impression, I dread to imagine what other problems
I'm going to run into - and that's why I've subscribed to this list
again.  Gnomehide, the totally unsupported by RH version, has actually
caused me less problems than this, so is Ximian for RH7.2 a beta
version, and if so, could this please be confirmed at the Ximian site?

Was Ximian Gnome for RH7.2 actually compiled on a Red Hat 7.2 system? 
The location of the ORBit (and other) header files really does make me
wonder.

Regards :)

Lee-J.