I am in the process of building Gnome 2.10 from source code on my Ubuntu 5.04. The process is smooth throughout except that I had some wierd problems in evolution-data-server module. It was because of the missing libnss-dev package and I took a long time to figure it out as the error was something else. Finally, installing libnss-dev and introducing a small workaround fixed the problem. I am now compiling the 72nd module (nautilus). In lot of modules, the configure stage will fail because of the absence of some xyz-dev package. Installing the package and rerunning the configure took me till here without any problem. The only extra work I did so far is for evolution-data-server. Once I complete this build, I am planning to write a guide for building Gnome 2 on Debian quoting the issues that I faced. It will be published in Gnome Bangalore’s Wiki page.

PS: I am not using the sources from Debian. I am getting the sources from Gnome CVS repository.