Re: building gnome from scratch

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 14:28, Don Raikes wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a redhat 9.0 system, and I am interested in building gnome 2.4 from 
> scratch.
> 
> I have tried garnome and jhbuild.
> Garnome has problems retrieving some packages so that when I am done, I am 
> missing things like gnome-session.

What do you mean by "problems"? Which packages?

As a rule, I would expect this to be the easiest method of all to build
GNOME from source if you are not really comfortable with what you are
doing.

You could also try asking about specific Garnome difficulties on its
dedicated mailing list:
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/garnome-list

> jhbuild has problems with similar packages.

My guess is that jhbuild will have problems downloading libtool-1.5,
since that has been removed from the GNU FTP sites and their mirrors
(its source has not been verified as correct after the FSF guys
discovered that their machines had been malicously compromised). This
should only affect jhbuild, not garnome (since libtool is not needed
when building from tarballs).

What other packages does jhbuild have problems with? I would expect it
to have different problems from garnome in this regard, since jhbuild
grabs most stuff from CVS, whereas garnome uses released tarballs.

> Is there a trick to building gnome, or is there a better method for doing 
> it?

Well, it is not entirely trivial to build from source; that is mostly a
consequence of the enormous size of the "standard" GNOME distribution
(you don't want to get me started on that). But both garnome and jhbuild
should more or less "just work", so if you can elucidate your problems
we may be able to help you in more specific ways.

There is another set of build scripts -- called vicious-build-scripts --
in GNOME CVS, but right at this very moment the GNOME 2.4 build probably
does not work. I have more or less been keeping those scripts up to date
and I haven't included some of the recent module branching that has been
going on (just a lack of time).

Personally, I would probably suggest sticking to Garnome as an initial
attempt. If you are having problems, either post something here, or even
better, ask on their mailing list.

Cheers,
Malcolm