Solution for the scrolling bug?

[Tobias Braun]

Hi,

I was advised on the IRC channel (which unfortunately seems almost dead) to 
post my question on the mailing list, so here we go:

On my Arch Linux system, the most recent stable GNUstep version (installed via 
pacman, the standard Arch package manager) exhibits a scrolling bug. From what 
I read by browsing the mailing list archives, I understand that the stable 
version of GS is not compatible with recent Cairo versions. This means I have 
to install a newer, unstable version of GS to get it to work.

Now I am not a regular Linux user, as I only set up this Arch Linux system in 
order to get to know Linux better, so I need some general advice. I use OS X as 
my main OS and know my way around the command line, but that's about it. I 
don't really know how package management works on Linux systems and how it 
interacts with stuff I'd install from source tarballs. So here are a few 
questions that come to my mind:

1. Arch has a system called AUR for compiling packages from source. Should I 
create AUR scripts for everything I install from source, or is this not 
recommended/necessary?

2. It appears that the default compiler for Arch is gcc. Is it necessary or 
recommended to use clang instead for GS?

3. Should I install clang via pacman?

4. Will installing clang interfere with the rest of the system? Will it 
effectively replace gcc for everything I am going to compile by default? How 
will build scripts know whether to use clang or gcc?

5. How is GNUstep development organized? What branches are there apart from the 
stable releases and where can I find them?

6. If anyone is wondering why I opted for Linux instead of e.g. FreeBSD: I 
tried to install that first, but 10.1-STABLE wouldn't even load the kernel 
image, it'd just freeze while trying to do so. 11.0-CURRENT would start the 
actual init procedure, but after a few pages of text, it'd stop with a weird 
error message which I don't remember right now. I guess there's not much I can 
do about that, can I?

I know that's a lot of questions. I hope someone can help me get a clearer 
picture of how these things work on Linux systems. At the moment, there's just 
a lot of confusion in my head.

Tobias