Simple install procedure ======================== % gzip -cd glib-@GLIB_VERSION@.tar.gz | tar xvf - # unpack the sources % cd glib-@GLIB_VERSION@ # 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. If you are using the native iconv implementation on Solaris instead of libiconv, you'll need to make sure that you have the converters between locale encodings and UTF-8 installed. At a minimum you'll need the SUNWuiu8 package. You probably should also install the SUNWciu8, SUNWhiu8, SUNWjiu8, and SUNWkiu8 packages. The native iconv on Compaq Tru64 doesn't contain support for UTF-8, so you'll need to use GNU libiconv instead. (When using GNU libiconv for GTK+, you'll need to use GNU libiconv for GNU gettext as well.) This probably applies to related operating systems as well. 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-debug=[yes/no/minimum] determines the amount of debugging code to include. 'yes' will includes some extra checks and debugging features that may be useful for people developing with GLib. 'no' produces a somewhat smaller and faster library at the expense of reduced robustness. [ Defaults to 'minimum' for stable releases ] * --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. [ --disable-gc-friendly is default ] * --disable-mem-pools Do not cache freed objects. When specified, GLib will immediately return freed memory to the C library instead of keeping around pools of free objects such as linked list and hash table nodes. Specifying this will make GLib slower in most cases, but it will use less memory. [ --enable-mem-pools is the 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. [ --enable-threads is the 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 ] * --enable-trio=[yes/no/auto] Specify whether to build using the included copy of the Trio library for string formatting functions like printf(). The default is 'auto', which means that Trio will be used if configure detects missing features in your system native printf implementation. 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 $exec_prefix/lib/pkgconfig to provide information when compiling other packages that depend on GTK+. If you set PKG_CONFIG_PATH so that it points to this directory, then you can get the correct include flags and library flags for compiling a GLib application with: pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0 pkg-config --libs glib-2.0 Cross-compiling GLib ==================== Cross-compilation is the proceess of compiling a program or library on a different architecture or operating system then it will be run upon. GLib is slightly more difficult to cross-compile than many packages because much of GLib is about hiding differences between different systems. These notes cover things specific to cross-compiling GLib; for general information about cross-compilation, see the autoconf info pages. GLib tries to detect as much information as possible about the target system by compiling and linking programs without actually running anything; however, some information GLib needs is not available this way. This information needs to be provided to the configure script via a "cache file" or by setting the cache variables in your environment. As an example of using a cache file, to cross compile for the "MingW32" Win32 runtine environment on a Linux system, create a file 'win32.cache' with the following contents: === glib_cv_long_long_format=ll glib_cv_stack_grows=no === Then execute the following commands: === PATH=/path/to/mingw32-compiler/bin:$PATH chmod a-w win32.cache # prevent configure from changing it ./configure --cache-file=win32.cache --host=mingw32 === The complete list of cache file variables follows. Most of these won't need to be set in most cases. Cache file variables ==================== glib_cv_long_long_format=[ll/q/I64] Format used by printf and scanf for 64 bit integers. "ll" is the C99 standard, and what is used by the 'trio' library that GLib builds if your printf() is insufficiently capable. Doesn't need to be set if you are compiling using trio. glib_cv_stack_grows=[yes/no] Whether the stack grows up or down. Most places will want "no", A few architectures, such as PA-RISC need "yes". glib_cv_working_bcopy=[yes/no] Whether your bcopy can handle overlapping copies. Only needs to be set if you don't have memmove. (Very unlikely) glib_cv_sane_realloc=[yes/np] Whether your realloc() conforms to ANSI C and can handle NULL as the first argument. Defaults to "yes" and probably doesn't need to be set. glib_cv_have_strlcpy=[yes/no] Whether you have strlcpy that matches OpenBSD. Defaults to "no", which is safe, since GLib uses a built-in version in that case. glib_cv_va_val_copy=[yes/no] Whether va_list can be copied as a pointer. If set to "no", then memcopy will be used. Only matters if you don't have va_copy or __va_copy. (So, doesn't matter for GCC.) Defaults to "yes" which is slightly more common than "no". glib_cv_rtldglobal_broken=[yes/no] Whether you have a bug found in OSF/1 v5.0. Defaults to "no". glib_cv_uscore=[yes/no] Whether an underscore needs to be prepended to symbols when looking them up via dlsym. Only needs to be set if your system uses dlopen/dlsym. ac_cv_func_posix_getpwuid_r=[yes/no] Whether you have a getpwuid_r function (in your C library, not your thread library) that conforms to the POSIX spec. (Takes a 'struct passwd **' as the final argument) ac_cv_func_nonposix_getpwuid_r=[yes/no] Whether you have some variant of getpwuid_r that doesn't conform to to the POSIX spec, but GLib might be able to use (or might segfault.) Only needs to be set if ac_cv_func_posix_getpwuid_r is not set. It's safest to set this to "no". glib_cv_use_pid_surrogate=[yes/no] Whether to use a setpriority() on the PID of the thread as a method for setting the priority of threads. This only needs to be set when using POSIX threads. ac_cv_func_printf_unix98=[yes/no] Whether your printf() family supports Unix98 style %N$ positional parameters. Defaults to "no". ac_cv_func_vsnprintf_c99=[yes/no] Whether you have a vsnprintf() with C99 semantics. (C99 semantics means returns the number of bytes that would have been written had the output buffer had enough space.). Defaults to "no".