This is not for the kids! ========================= JHBuild offers a mean to pull the latest software and the latest bugs from upstream source repositories. In particular, it will expose the build failures that plenty of GNOME modules have at some time. You should NOT use JHBuild if you do not know how to deal with these failures. This tool is aimed at developers who need the latest version of some modules or module sets or at advanced users curious of new developments or upstream bug fixes, but in all cases at people who are able to understand and fix build failures. Using development snapshots along of your Debian system might corrupt your configuration or data files. Use at your own risk. Size matters ============ Building the full GNOME moduleset uses a lot of disk space: the GNOME 2.16 moduleset uses between 5 and 6 GB for the checkouted data, build dirs, and installed files. User Manual -- slightly obsolete ================================ The JHBuild user manual is at /usr/share/doc/jhbuild/jhbuild.html; unfortunately it's not completely up-to-date, so take its advice with a grain of salt. Configuring JHBuild =================== There are sample configuration files for JHBuild under /usr/share/doc/jhbuild. I suggest you create a separate "jhbuild" user for building, but also to run the resulting binaries. Keep in mind that some resources are shared with your Debian system, such as your GConf settings. I personally prefer checkouting, building, and installing under the home directory of the user invoking jhbuild; this can be achieved with: checkoutroot = os.path.expanduser('~/jhbuild/checkout') prefix = os.path.expanduser('~/jhbuild/prefix') Scripts ======= The upstream scripts/ dir has many small utilities which were mostly useful in the days where GNOME modules were kept in CVS. Nowadays, some scripts are quite obsolete.