Building GNOME Shell: instructions not working

[William Lachance <wrlach gmail com>]

So I was interested in hacking on GNOME Shell a week or so ago, so I
set myself to the task of building it from source. I'd already done
this a year or so ago, so I figured it would be relatively simple. It
turned out to be a much more involved task than I expected. After
fixing a bunch of random breakage in GTK+ and librsvg, and plowing
through a bunch of modules that didn't work, I found out that the
instructions posted here:

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell#Building

... are out of date, and that the canonical way of building GNOME
Shell is now via the gnome 3.4 module checked into jhbuild. After
finding this out (thanks to whoever helped me out with this on IRC), I
did indeed eventually manage to get something going after babysitting
the build process and manually installing a bunch of new external
dependencies on this machine. I filed a bug about this:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=668440

... but so far haven't received a response. I thought I'd bring this
up here, both to highlight the bug itself as well as the issue of
keeping build instructions up to date in general. The streamlined
approach that existed before was a great boon to potential
contributors to gnome shell such as myself, it would be great if we
could get that going again.

Thanks!
-- 
William Lachance
wrlach gmail com