Simple install procedure ======================== % gzip -cd glib-2.0.0.tar.gz | tar xvf - # unpack the sources % cd glib-2.0.0 # change to the toplevel directory % ./configure # run the `configure' script % make # build GLIB [ Become root if necessary ] % rm -rf /install-prefix/include/glib.h /install-prefix/include/gmodule.h % make install # install GLIB Requirements ============ GLib-2.0 requires pkg-config, which is tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for libraries. (For each library, a small .pc text file is installed in a standard location that contains the compilation flags needed for that library along with version number information.) Information about pkg-config can be found at: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/ GNU make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make) is also recommended. In order to implement conversions between character sets, GLib requires an implementation of the standard iconv() routine. Most modern systems will have a suitable implementation, however many older systems lack an iconv() implementation. On such systems, you must install the libiconv library. This can be found at: http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/ If your system has an iconv implementation but you want to use libiconv instead, you can pass the --with-libiconv option to configure. This forces libiconv to be used. Note that if you have libiconv installed in your default include search path (for instance, in /usr/local/), but don't enable it, you will get an error while compiling GTK+ because the iconv.h that libiconv installs hides the system iconv. Finally, for message catalog handling, GTK+ requires an implementation of gettext(). If your system doesn't provide this functionality, you should use the libintl library from the GNU gettext package, available from: http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/ The Nitty-Gritty ================ The 'configure' script can be given a number of options to enable and disable various features. For a complete list, type: ./configure --help A few of the more important ones: * --prefix=PREFIX install architecture-independent files in PREFIX [ Defaults to /usr/local ] * --exec-prefix=EPREFIX install architecture-dependent files in EPREFIX [ Defaults to the value given to --prefix ] * --enable-gc-friendly When enabled all memory freed by the application, but retained by GLib for performance reasons is set to zero, thus making deployed garbage collection or memory profiling tools detect unlinked memory correctly. This will make GLib slightly slower. [ Disabled by default ] * --disable-threads Do not compile GLib to be multi thread safe. GLib will be slightly faster then. This is however not recommended, as many programs rely on GLib being multi thread safe. [ Enabled by default ] * --with-threads=[none/posix/dce/solaris/win32] Specify a thread implementation to use. * 'posix' and 'dce' can be used interchangeable to mean the different versions of posix threads. configure tries to find out, which one is installed. * 'solaris' uses the native Solaris thread implementation. * 'none' means that GLib will be thread safe, but does not have a default thread implementation. This has to be supplied to g_thread_init() by the programmer. [ Determined by configure by default ] Options can be given to the compiler and linker by setting environment variables before running configure. A few of the more important ones: CC : The C compiler to use CPPFLAGS : Flags for the C preprocesser such as -I and -D CFLAGS : C compiler flags The most important use of this is to set the optimization/debugging flags. For instance, to compile with no debugging information at all, run configure as: CFLAGS=-O2 ./configure # Bourne compatible shells (sh/bash/zsh) or, setenv CFLAGS -O2 ; ./configure # csh and variants Installation directories ======================== The location of the installed files is determined by the --prefix and --exec-prefix options given to configure. There are also more detailed flags to control individual directories. However, the use of these flags is not tested. One particular detail to note, is that the architecture-dependent include file glibconfig.h is installed in: $exec_prefix/lib/glib/include/ if you have a version in $prefix/include, this is out of date and should be deleted. .pc files for the various libraries are installed in $exec_prefix/lib/pkgconfig to provide information when compiling other packages that depend on GTK+. If you set PKG_CONFIG_PATH so that it points to this directory, then you can get the correct include flags and library flags for compiling a GLib application with: pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0 pkg-config --libs glib-2.0