How do I get GNOME tarballs?

Tarball (i.e. compressed archives of the source code using tar and gzip) releases of GNOME are made at ftp://ftp.gnome.org under the /pub/GNOME/ directory. These files are then copied to the GNOME FTP mirror sites, listed at http://www.gnome.org/ftpmirrors.shtml. If both the ftp and web site are down, a relatively safe mirror is at ftp://gnomeftp.wgn.net/pub/gnome.

These tarballs are the only official releases of GNOME, and the only version that the developers can be guaranteed to have direct control over. Currently, the most recent versions of each package can be found in sources/latest, the current grouping of tarballs for the GNOME-1.0 release are in gnome-1.0/sources.

If you want up-to-date development tarballs of GNOME, Jim Pick Software posts daily snapshots of the development tree in tarball form. You can get them at ftp://ftp.jimpick.com/pub/gnome/snap. Generally he keeps a few key days of each package on file, and diff files so that you can recreate the snapshots of any other day. Note that these are not releases, they are unstable snapshots, and should not be used in a production system unless you know exactly what you are doing.