Common knowledge in jhbuild for funny modules

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

PolicyKit wants to install /lib/security/pamblahblah.so.  Since I don't
run jhbuild as root, and I definitely don't want it to mess with my
system installation, I need to

1. wait for the (already painful) jhbuild process to reach PolicyKit,
and watch it fail.

2. Parse the error in my head.  Decide that installing stuff to system
directories is stupid if I'm running jhbuild.

3. Look in PolicyKit/configure.in to see if it has an option to set an
alternate path.

4. Find the option, and pass --with-pam-module-dir=/home/federico/blah

Should this kind of knowledge be encoded in jhbuild somewhere?  Or
should modules detect that they are not being installed to the system
location, and so it really doesn't make sense for them to try to install
stuff in system directories?

Then, we have avahi, which lists dbus-python as a dependency.  In turn,
jhbuild requires pyrex in order to build dbus-python.  However, pyrex
is *not* installed as part of jhbuild's bootstrap installation of
Python.  So, dbus-python is unbuildable.

My WSOP student wasted about three weeks trying to get jhbuild to work
up to Evolution.  It shouldn't be this painful.

  Federico