Going with jhbuild to get GNOME 2.5 compiled was most fun. It had 88 modules to compile, most of which were performed seamlessly, and went things went bad, I installed appropriate packages. I did a stock Workstation install of Fedora Core 1 to begin. I used jamesh’s sample .jhbuildrc, which loaded stuff into /opt/gtk2 (I’ll have to rebuild at some stage with Mozilla stuff as I’ve modified the sample.jhbuildrc now).
First error came with shared-mime-info (#132899), and I ignored it. Next hit was the gnome-vfs module requiring libbz2. Solved easily by yum install bzip2-devel. At module 27/88, we have the icon theme issue (#107979).
I was still ridden with a few more errors: 69/88 nautilus-media, 80/88 mozilla-gtkmozembed (the .jhbuildrc I used ignored Mozilla, so this is acceptable), 81/88 gnomemeeting whining about aclocal errors, and 85/88 glade. That said, I followed the README from the cvs checkout and it told me to add a file to /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions; I tried, but did not get far sadly (5.45am, sleepy, tired).
The “correct”, Fedora way is to go to /etc/X11/dm/Sessions, and create an executable file called jhbuild.desktop. It’s contents are:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=GNOME2.6
Comment=GNOME2.6
Exec=/home/byte/bin/jhbuild run /opt/gnome2/bin/gnome-session
Icon=
Type=Application
GNOME2.6 will be an option in your GDM now, so login, and have a ball of a time. I’m testing it now, and most of everything works wonderfully.