How hard is it to get gnucash to compile from source?

[Rusty Carruth]

I have a situation where I want to modify gnucash to
report the 'rolled-up' balance when I make a 'register'
page (the page that shows balance, transaction, etc,
and that shows up as a tabbed page along with the 
account summary/tree), when doing an account with
subaccounts WITH the included subaccounts.

(whew!  If that did not make sense, I can try again...)

I think I inquired about that feature a while back, and
what I remember was silence, so I'm thinking its time
to get gnucash compiling and figure out how to add
a 'include subaccounts in balance' option....

However, I remember how much excitement I had upgrading
to a more recent gnucash - is this going to take me longer
to get gnucash to compile than to wait for someone else
to add the feature?  ;-) / 2

(Background - I'm a SW developer by profession, working
on Solaris doing non-gui development (IC Testers, right
now).  Been doing SW for a long time.  Currently running
Mandrake 8.1, but I'm still not entirely happy with the
RPM method of trying to keep things up-to-date.  (But I
am not an RPM install guru by any stretch of the imagination!))

rc