HowTo for Gnome2??

["John W. M. Stevens" <john@betelgeuse.us>]

Hello,

I upgraded from stable to testing, in order to be able to start using
Gnome2, only to find that there was no good way to get a complete,
usable Gnome2 installation.

Many things are broken, including:

1) Fonts.  They are really ugly, and it seems that the previous
   defaults were just ignored.

2) The Gnome Settings Daemon was not installed, and it repeatedly
   complains about that lack.  I can't find any package that indicates
   that it might contain this semi-mythical daemon.

3) It seems impossible to figure out what will conflict with what,
   without actually trying just about every combination.  Incompatible
   packages are all stuffed into the gnome section, with no clue as
   to what packages should be installed to get a reasonably complete
   Gnome2 installation.  I seem to have installed, and uninstalled,
   parts of both Gnome and Gnome2 several times now.

   There was rumour of a gnome2 meta package.  It doesn't seem to
   actually exist.  Perhaps it's only in experimental?

4) There SHOULD be a way to run both Gnome and Gnome2 on the same
   machine, as the major number of the libraries is different, but
   the packages seem to be configured in such a way as to insist
   that these are incompatible.

   Yes, this will eat up more memory (both library versions must
   be resident at the same time), but if Gnome2 in testing simply
   isn't yet complete, then I really have no choice.

Is there any documentation on how, using testing, to get the most
complete (applets, to, please!) Gnome2 installation possible?

Please, no suggestion about "pinning" anything, as there doesn't
seem to be any documentation or man pages about what that is, or
how to do that, either.

Thanks,
John S.