FWTools is The Bomb, but no Mapserver release has it all

I've been using the Mapserver binary included in FWTools for awhile now, and been very happy with it. It comes out-of-the-box with the lovely AGG driver included, as well as Python mapscript. When combined with the extensive odd-format support that Frank includes in the gdal and ogr tools, and the fact that it's all self-contained, it really makes it hard to beat. Of course inevitably you're going to find that something has to be left out, and I just found 2 of them - PDF output format, and null grid shifting support. The first isn't critical, but the second is a potential deal breaker, as I believe it is causing reprojection artifacts to be created in my Google Map tiles. So, it's probably time to figure out, and document, a reliable way to build MapServer from source, since "Oh by the way", the apt-get version of Mapserver lacks AGG support. Go figure.