Virtual build environment

[Prof J C Nash <nashjc ncf ca>]

I have made this a separate posting from my build woes as it may be of 
value to the Gnumeric and other communities.

As I had some difficulties doing the Gnumeric build in Ubuntu, which I 
now believe to be due to the Ubuntu folk having to change a set of 
library file names because of a name collision between two pieces of 
software, I have been building in a virtual machine. At first I used VM 
Ware server free version, but I believe that may be time limited. Now 
I"m using Innotek's VirtualBox and have found it quite useful, indeed in 
more ways than just for builds.

I have tested copying the VBox "hard drive" of my virtual machine. It's 
a little big at 5.1GB, but when I got it on a second machine it came up 
and had preserved the state -- my final error msg was on the screen in 
the terminal window.

It seems to me that a VBox "hard drive" set up to to builds would be a 
relatively painless way to get more folk able to do the builds. Setting 
up JHBUILD is non-trivial. I plan to post some notes when (if?) I 
succeed. However, I know I would have jumped at doing a bittorrent 
download of a disk image.

Am I a late-comer to this idea? It seems a no-brainer except for the 
file size, which is big, but not exceptionally so.

JN