gnumeric

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ling.ucsc.edu>]

I have a stable (2.2r3) system and this is the wrong time for me to
think of upgrading to testing. It would be very useful, though, to
have a more up-to-date version of gnumeric than the one available in
stable (stable has 0.47; testing has 0.64).

I don't use the whole gnome beast, but I do use two parts of
it---gnumeric and panel, so I have (at least) as much of the gnome
setup as is required to run them.

I thought to try to compile the version of gnumeric that's in testing
and tried:

  apt-get --compile source gnumeric

(after adding the needed line to sources.list and updating).

The configuration script, however, exits early on with this message:

configure: error: Could not find the gnomeConf.sh file that is generated by gnome-libs install
make: *** [build-stamp] Error 1
Build command 'cd gnumeric-0.64 && dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc' failed.
E: Child process failed

I'm not sure which of the gnome libraries causes the creation of
gnomeConf.sh on installation. Guessing, I tried installing
libgnome-dev from stable, but apt offered to install a total of 13
packages to satisfy dependencies. And that seemed like too much
overhead for an upgrade of one program, especially when I wasn't sure
that installing all that stuff would actually solve the problem.

Is there anyone who has successfully compiled more recent versions of
gnumeric on a potato system? Or is there anyone who could offer advice
on how to get further with this?

Thanks very much,

Jim