Well, it's not actually hell but it is more work than you might expect.

When I recently tried to build gimp 2.0 I found that the configure script said I needed fontconfig v2.x, whereas my RH9 system has fontconfig 1.x. After waiting around while the fontconfig host site (freedesktop.org) was rebuilt after a hacker invaded, I finally managed to get fontconfig built today. When I went back to try the GIMP build again I found I had other dependency problems. Essentially, you need to build all the required sources if you're using an “aging” distribution like RH9 (yes, I know, it's been end-of-lifed since March 04 but I haven't upgraded to fedora yet).

So now I'm building GTK 2.2.4 and friends. I'll stick all of these in one directory tree under /usr/local so when I do upgrade, I can just toss all of this and get an rpm of the packages I need for Fedora.

Strange though that I have GIMP 2.x running at home and I don't remember going through these tribulations. I just need to upgrade to Fedora at work and be done with it.