<refentry id="glib-building" revision="16 Jan 2002"> <refmeta> <refentrytitle>Compiling the GLib package</refentrytitle> <manvolnum>3</manvolnum> <refmiscinfo>GLib Library</refmiscinfo> </refmeta> <refnamediv> <refname>Compiling the GLib Package</refname> <refpurpose> How to compile GLib itself </refpurpose> </refnamediv> <refsect1 id="building"> <title>Building the Library on UNIX</title> <para> On UNIX, GLib uses the standard GNU build system, using <application>autoconf</application> for package configuration and resolving portability issues, <application>automake</application> for building makefiles that comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and <application>libtool</application> for building shared libraries on multiple platforms. The normal sequence for compiling and installing the GLib library is thus: <literallayout> <userinput>./configure</userinput> <userinput>make</userinput> <userinput>make install</userinput> </literallayout> </para> <para> The standard options provided by <application>GNU autoconf</application> may be passed to the <command>configure</command> script. Please see the <application>autoconf</application> documentation or run <command>./configure --help</command> for information about the standard options. </para> <para> The GTK+ documentation contains <ulink url="../gtk/gtk-building.html">further details</ulink> about the build process and ways to influence it. </para> </refsect1> <refsect1 id="dependencies"> <title>Dependencies</title> <para> 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 <application>autoconf</application>) are <command>pkg-config</command> and GNU make. </para> <itemizedlist> <listitem> <para> <ulink url="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/">pkg-config</ulink> is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for libraries that are used by the GLib library. (For each library, a small <literal>.pc</literal> 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 <command>pkg-config</command> needed to build GLib is mirrored in the <filename>dependencies</filename> directory on the <ulink url="ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.2/">GTK+ FTP site.</ulink> </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> The GTK+ makefiles will mostly work with different versions of <command>make</command>, however, there tends to be a few incompatibilities, so the GTK+ team recommends installing <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/software/make">GNU make</ulink> if you don't already have it on your system and using it. (It may be called <command>gmake</command> rather than <command>make</command>.) </para> </listitem> </itemizedlist> <para> GLib depends on a number of other libraries. </para> <itemizedlist> <listitem> <para> The <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">GNU libiconv library</ulink> is needed to build GLib if your system doesn't have the <function>iconv()</function> function for doing conversion between character encodings. Most modern systems should have <function>iconv()</function>, however many older systems lack an <function>iconv()</function> implementation. On such systems, you must install the libiconv library. This can be found at: <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv">http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv</ulink>. </para> <para> If your system has an <function>iconv()</function> implementation but you want to use libiconv instead, you can pass the --with-libiconv option to configure. This forces libiconv to be used. </para> <para> Note that if you have libiconv installed in your default include search path (for instance, in <filename>/usr/local/</filename>), but don't enable it, you will get an error while compiling GLib because the <filename>iconv.h</filename> that libiconv installs hides the system iconv. </para> <para> 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. </para> <para> 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. </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> The libintl library from the <ulink url="http://www.gtk.org/software/gettext">GNU gettext package</ulink> is needed if your system doesn't have the <function>gettext()</function> functionality for handling message translation databases. </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> 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. </para> </listitem> </itemizedlist> </refsect1> <refsect1 id="extra-configuration-options"> <title>Extra Configuration Options</title> <para> In addition to the normal options, the <command>configure</command> script in the GLib library supports these additional arguments: <cmdsynopsis> <command>configure</command> <group> <arg>--enable-debug=[no|minimum|yes]</arg> </group> <group> <arg>--disable-gc-friendly</arg> <arg>--enable-gc-friendly</arg> </group> <group> <arg>--disable-mem-pools</arg> <arg>--enable-mem-pools</arg> </group> <group> <arg>--disable-threads</arg> <arg>--enable-threads</arg> </group> <group> <arg>--with-threads=[none|posix|dce|solaris|win32]</arg> </group> <group> <arg>--disable-included-printf</arg> <arg>--enable-included-printf</arg> </group> <group> <arg>--disable-gtk-doc</arg> <arg>--enable-gtk-doc</arg> </group> </cmdsynopsis> </para> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--enable-debug</systemitem></title> <para> 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 <link linkend="GLIB-Debug-Options">runtime debugging</link>. 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 <option>--enable-debug=no</option> should <emphasis>not</emphasis> be used for stable releases of GLib. </para> </formalpara> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--disable-gc-friendly</systemitem> and <systemitem>--enable-gc-friendly</systemitem></title> <para> 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. </para> </formalpara> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--disable-mem-pools</systemitem> and <systemitem>--enable-mem-pools</systemitem></title> <para> 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 <function>g_malloc()</function> and <function>g_free()</function> functions. Code currently affected by this: <itemizedlist> <listitem> <para> <structname>GList</structname>, <structname>GSList</structname>, <structname>GNode</structname>, <structname>GHash</structname> allocations </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> <structname>GMemChunk</structname>s become basically non-effective </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> <structname>GSignal</structname> disables all caching (potentially very slow) </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> <structname>GType</structname> doesn't honour the <structname>GTypeInfo</structname> <structfield>n_preallocs</structfield> field anymore </para> </listitem> <listitem> <para> the <structname>GBSearchArray</structname> flag <literal>G_BSEARCH_ALIGN_POWER2</literal> becomes non-functional </para> </listitem> </itemizedlist> </para> </formalpara> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--disable-threads</systemitem> and <systemitem>--enable-threads</systemitem></title> <para> 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. </para> </formalpara> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--with-threads</systemitem></title> <para> Specify a thread implementation to use. <itemizedlist> <listitem><para> 'posix' and 'dce' can be used interchangeable to mean the different versions of Posix threads. configure tries to find out, which one is installed. </para></listitem> <listitem><para> 'solaris' uses the native Solaris thread implementation. </para></listitem> <listitem><para> 'none' means that GLib will be thread safe, but does not have a default thread implementation. This has to be supplied to <function>g_thread_init()</function> by the programmer. </para></listitem> </itemizedlist> </para> </formalpara> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--disable-included-printf</systemitem> and <systemitem>--enable-included-printf</systemitem></title> <para> By default the <command>configure</command> script will try to auto-detect whether the C library provides a suitable set of <function>printf()</function> functions. In detail, <command>configure</command> checks that the semantics of <function>snprintf()</function> 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 <function>printf()</function> family. These options can be used to explicitly control whether an implementation fo the <function>printf()</function> family should be included or not. </para> </formalpara> <formalpara> <title><systemitem>--disable-gtk-doc</systemitem> and <systemitem>--enable-gtk-doc</systemitem></title> <para> By default the <command>configure</command> script will try to auto-detect whether the <application>gtk-doc</application> 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 <application>gtk-doc</application> 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. </para> </formalpara> </refsect1> </refentry>