Compiling the GLib package
Compiling the GLib Package —
How to compile GLib itself
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Building the Library on UNIX
On UNIX, GLib uses the standard GNU build system,
using autoconf for package
configuration and resolving portability issues,
automake for building makefiles
that comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and
libtool for building shared
libraries on multiple platforms. The normal sequence for
compiling and installing the GLib library is thus:
./configure
make
make install
The standard options provided by GNU
autoconf may be passed to the
configure script. Please see the
autoconf documentation or run
./configure --help for information about
the standard options.
The GTK+ documentation contains
further details
about the build process and ways to influence it.
Dependencies
Before you can compile the GLib library, you need to have
various other tools and libraries installed on your
system. The two tools needed during the build process (as
differentiated from the tools used in when creating GLib
mentioned above such as autoconf)
are pkg-config and GNU make.
pkg-config
is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for
libraries that are used by the GLib library. (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.) The version of pkg-config
needed to build GLib is mirrored in the
dependencies directory
on the GTK+ FTP
site.
The GTK+ makefiles will mostly work with different versions
of make, however, there tends to be
a few incompatibilities, so the GTK+ team recommends
installing GNU
make if you don't already have it on your system
and using it. (It may be called gmake
rather than make.)
GLib depends on a number of other libraries.
-
The GNU
libiconv library is needed to build GLib if your
system doesn't have the iconv()
function for doing conversion between character
encodings. Most modern systems should have
iconv(), 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 GLib 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 GLib, you'll need to use GNU libiconv
for GNU gettext as well.) This probably applies to related
operating systems as well.
The libintl library from the GNU gettext
package is needed if your system doesn't have the
gettext() functionality for handling
message translation databases.
A thread implementation is needed, unless you want to compile GLib
without thread support, which is not recommended. The thread support
in GLib can be based upon several native thread implementations,
e.g. POSIX threads, DCE threads or Solaris threads.
Extra Configuration Options
In addition to the normal options, the
configure script in the GLib
library supports these additional arguments:
configure [[--enable-debug=[no|minimum|yes]]] [[--disable-gc-friendly] | [--enable-gc-friendly]] [[--disable-mem-pools] | [--enable-mem-pools]] [[--disable-threads] | [--enable-threads]] [[--with-threads=[none|posix|dce|solaris|win32]]] [[--disable-included-printf] | [--enable-included-printf]] [[--disable-visibility] | [--enable-visibility]] [[--disable-gtk-doc] | [--enable-gtk-doc]] [[--disable-man] | [--enable-man]]
--enable-debug.
Turns on various amounts of debugging support. Setting this to 'no'
disables g_assert(), g_return_if_fail(), g_return_val_if_fail() and
all cast checks between different object types. Setting it to 'minimum' disables only cast checks. Setting it to 'yes' enables
runtime debugging.
The default is 'minimum'.
Note that 'no' is fast, but dangerous as it tends to destabilize
even mostly bug-free software by changing the effect of many bugs
from simple warnings into fatal crashes. Thus
--enable-debug=no should not
be used for stable releases of GLib.
--disable-gc-friendly and
--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 and is thus disabled by default.
--disable-mem-pools and
--enable-mem-pools.
Many small chunks of memory are often allocated via collective pools
in GLib and are cached after release to speed up reallocations.
For sparse memory systems this behaviour is often inferior, so
memory pools can be disabled to avoid excessive caching and force
atomic maintenance of chunks through the g_malloc()
and g_free() functions. Code currently affected by
this:
GList, GSList,
GNode, GHash
allocations. The functions g_list_push_allocator(),
g_list_pop_allocator(), g_slist_push_allocator(),
g_slist_pop_allocator(), g_node_push_allocator() and
g_node_pop_allocator() are not available
GMemChunks become basically non-effective
GSignal disables all caching (potentially
very slow)
GType doesn't honour the
GTypeInfo
n_preallocs field anymore
the GBSearchArray flag
G_BSEARCH_ALIGN_POWER2 becomes non-functional
--disable-threads and
--enable-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.
--with-threads.
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.
--disable-included-printf and
--enable-included-printf.
By default the configure script will try
to auto-detect whether the C library provides a suitable set
of printf() functions. In detail,
configure checks that the semantics of
snprintf() are as specified by C99 and
that positional parameters as specified in the Single Unix
Specification are supported. If this not the case, GLib will
include an implementation of the printf()
family.
These options can be used to explicitly control whether
an implementation fo the printf() family
should be included or not.
--disable-visibility and
--enable-visibility.
By default, GLib uses ELF visibility attributes to optimize
PLT table entries if the compiler supports ELF visibility
attributes. A side-effect of the way in which this is currently
implemented is that any header change forces a full
recompilation, and missing includes may go unnoticed.
Therefore, it makes sense to turn this feature off while
doing GLib development, even if the compiler supports ELF
visibility attributes. The --disable-visibility
option allows to do that.
--disable-gtk-doc and
--enable-gtk-doc.
By default the configure script will try
to auto-detect whether the
gtk-doc package is installed. If
it is, then it will use it to extract and build the
documentation for the GLib library. These options
can be used to explicitly control whether
gtk-doc should be
used or not. If it is not used, the distributed,
pre-generated HTML files will be installed instead of
building them on your machine.
--disable-man and
--enable-man.
By default the configure script will try
to auto-detect whether xsltproc
and the necessary Docbook stylesheets are installed. If
they are, then it will use them to rebuild the included
man pages from the XML sources. These options can be used
to explicitly control whether man pages should be rebuilt
used or not. The distribution includes pre-generated man
pages.
