Gnome Compiling Instructions a bit fuzzy

["Sean D. Rafferty" <teewan psu edu>]

I am attempting to compile the Gnome 2.1 sources from the tarballs to
gain some experience with packaging and whatnot.  My main problem is
making sure the packages are "registered" (perhaps not the proper
terminology, sorry).  After the regular configure, make, make intall, I
run the ldconfig.  As far as I know, this "registers" the packages with
Linux (I'm using redhat 7.3).  Running pkg-config --list-all does not
show _all_ the packages I (properly?) compiled and installed.  I've read
about exporting a proper PKG_CONFIG_PATH and mine is currently at
/usr/local/lib and /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig.

I read somewhere that you should remove older versions of a package
before installing newer ones.  Gnome.org posts:

"If you are installing from source onto a system that has GNOME
installed via the packaging system, please remove the packages before
compiling."

How does one go about doing this?  Can someone point me to documentation
that describes in detail package managing?

Thanks in advance!