Installing/Testing changes to a WM

[Stewbond]

I'm using vanilla Gnome on Arch Linux. I've made changes to Gnome's default window manager and I'm having trouble figuring out how to test/install my changes.

$ git clone git://git.gnome.org/mutter mutter
$ cd mutter
<make code changes>
$ ./autogen.sh
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo shutdown -r now

I expect that I reboot with my changes active. However I've noticed that my changes have no effect. Since I'm not sure how to run this with a debugger, I've been using fprintf() in a bunch of places, but the output file (/tmp/mutterDebug.txt) isn't created. Actually, I'm not even sure that mutter (default WM for Gnome3) is even running. $ ps -ef | grep "mutter" doesn't yeild anything, and searching for other common WMs (i.e. metacity) also seems to have no results.

Any ideas on how to install/debug in this enviornment would be appreciated.

Edit:
It seems that the install script does work. Though a reboot will put me in some out-of-the-box window manager, if I type $ mutter --replace I can get my code to run. I'm not sure which WM is running on startup or how to get mutter to be the default WM. Note that when I run this command, the rest of gnome-shell stops so I loose all ALT+TAB, panels, or lense functionality. Therefore I really need to be able to boot with the proper WM.

[Stewbond]

Got a little further.

The original window manager is install in /usr (/usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share). When I run make install, my new application is installed in /usr/local (/usr/local/bin, /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/share). This is why rebooting will give me the original WM, while mutter --replace will give me the new one (/usr/local/bin appears before /usr/bin in $PATH).

Now I need to figure out how to get make install to install to /usr/* instead of /usr/local/*.

I've searched the auto-generated 898-line makefile and only found one instance where /usr/local is defined. I replaced that with /usr and re-ran the makefile, but no change was seen. Help! How can I configure the makefile to correct the install directory?

[Stewbond]

Solution:

$ git clone git://git.gnome.org/mutter mutter
$ cd mutter
<make code changes>
$ ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo shutdown -r now

Suggestions:
1. Work off of the branch compared to what is already installed on your system. Sometimes the unstable binaries have dependancies which are not updated on your system and things can break.
2. Use a VM.