[Wlug] The Package Chase

OK, I've been going along merrily with my SuSE 7.2 for about a year, and I just now ran into a problem that a lot of you folks must know all too well. Install a new program and it calls for a package you don't have. You've all seen the lists, I'm sure. I'm trying to install ecawave and ALSA 0.9, and I've had to install some gtk and gnome stuff, and I went to look at upgrading the whole gnome package. There's a list of more than 50 things to compile, and they must be done in the correct order. Do people actually do that? Is there any advantage of doing that over upgrading the whole distribution?