I just built sawfish and sawfish-gnome from source and installed them on a woody system that had been using Ximian/Helix's sawfish. I ran into a little oddity that blocked installation, and I thought I'd report it (and the work-around) for the benefit of those who follow.
The current debian packages have sawfish and sawfish-gnome as alternatives; one replaces the other. But the previous packages had sawfish-gnome depending on sawfish. I don't know if that's a Ximian thing or just an earlier version thing. So if you try to install sawfish-gnome it says it must remove sawfish. But then, apparently looking at the current version, it says removing sawfish -> must remove sawfish-gnome, which it can't do because it's being installed. Other routes in lead to similar problems (I can't recall if it was dpkg or apt-get that was doing the complaining). Anyway, I switched window managers and apt-remove sawfish and sawfish-gnome. This also took out helix-sweetpill, which is just eye-candy (I think). Then I could install sawfish-gnome without problems. This is also an interesting case for the apt logic that manages packages. Perhaps it should be testing based on the projected state rather than the current one? I'm not sure if that would be adequate to keep the system properly glued together though.
