** ALERT!! **

I installed Red Hat with the very minimal amount of programs, since I wanted to have a good idea of what is installed and what is not. My first step, an e-mail client, for which I selected balsa-2.0.11

Much swearing, huffing, and puffing later, I manege to install most of the things it needs, since the versions I have don't have the *.pc files. However, now in order to install libgnome-2.2.0.1 I needed to install gnome-vfs-2.3.2 which needed libbonobo-2.3.1 which also apparently also needs OAF (juding by the errors in make config and the README file). This is not the same as bonobo-activation-2.2.0 which I have already installed.

Now my problem. OAF uses glib-config, which is no longer used in nodern versions, and not the glib-2.2.1 that I've already installed. My idea was to install a version of glib that HAS glib-config (1.2.9) compile and install OAF, then re-install 2.2.1 However, configure starts complaining that I really have 1.2.10 when the glib-congif says 1.2.9. So I change the glib-config file so it displays 1.2.10 as its version number. Now it says that whlie glib-config says its 1.2.10, 1.2.9 libraries are installed.



So a few questions.
1) How salvagable is my situation? Is there any way to do a massive purge of glib and re-install from scratch?
2) Should I give up on this e-mail client and switch to something simpler?
3) Should I just give up trying to install everything myself and do everything via rpms?

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3) Should I just give up trying to install everything myself and do everything via rpms?

Red Hat is far easier to maintain with rpms than the way you are doing it.
If you want to install everything yourself, I suggest you switch to Slackware which is set up for everything to be installed as the user sees fit. Installing everything yourself using Slackware is probably much easier than installing everything yourself using Red Hat.
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2) Should I give up on this e-mail client and switch to something simpler?

You are going to have dependency problems with anything you install on a bare bones system until you have installed all of the more popular libraries.
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1) How salvagable is my situation? Is there any way to do a massive purge of glib and re-install from scratch?

Since balsa is your first step above a bare bones system, the fastest way to get back to a bare bones system is to redo your Red Hat install.
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