The point for having an upstream GNOME installation built from sources is if you are going to build an extension, a theme or a GTK App and take advantage of all the new features of next GNOME. However it is also useful if you want to help GNOME to get better by submitting bugs ..or it could be useful if you are just curious to see what’s coming next :)
The tool for building GNOME is nothing else than JHBuild.
Intro
I am not going to write a full guide for how to install GNOME with JHBuild by just giving some commands, instead I will explain some basic points and then you can check on the official documentation before you start building. So this is just a quick intro and doesn’t explain all possibilities of JHBuild tool.
What JHBuild is?
JHBuild is a small application/tool, that helps us to install software from sources by setting a sandboxed environment. It also handles every dependency of the software we want to build by downloading it, configuring it, building it and installing it.
JHBuild is part of freedesktop.org and started for GNOME, but today many applications provide JHBuild modulesets. In this tutorial we just get bother only with building GNOME.
Will JHBuild brake my system?
Absolute no! JHBuild will use an isolated from the rest of your system installation similar to NPM and RVM. However it can mess up with your Apps configuration files. For example if you build Gimp with JHBuild and you have also Gimp distributor package, both installation will use the same configs.
You can easily avoid that, by using a different account just for running latest GNOME.
How much time will take to build GNOME?
It depends from your connections and your system! A typical installation (in my case) includes Gnome-Shell, Gnome-Control-Center, Empathy and Gnome Themes ..plus all their dependencies. That means downloading and building around 120 packages from GIT. With my ~7Mbps connection and and an Intel Ivy Bridge i5, it takes approximately 3-4hours and it uses around 6-7GB of space.
However there is not need to staring at it, right? Updating is much faster.
Read More:http://worldofgnome.org/how-to-easily-install-the-very-latest-gnome-in-any-distro-with-jhbuild/