Re: Gnome developer questions

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

Hi Eric!

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Eric Harlow wrote:
> I'm making the jump from GTK+ to Gnome and had a few questions after
> trying to get a simple gnome application to compile from scratch. 
> Answers greatly appreciated. 
> 
> 1 - Examples don't compile well when not in the gnome-lib tree.  I
> don't think it's reasonable to expect people to be building their
> applications in gnome-libs or within the gnome tree.  Maybe there's a
> reason for it, but I didn't find anything about why this is so.
> 

Which examples do you mean? (This may well be true...)

You might want to look at my GnomeHello app:

 http://www106.pair.com/rhp/gnome-hello-0.1.tar.gz

Comments on that are welcome.

The 'macros' directory thing is broken, it's in the queue for fixing.

> 2 - Hello world - ack!
> Ok, I'm not a autoconf fan yet.  I like nice simple makefiles.  GTK+
> was nice and easy since it did the compile flags and link flags with
> the gtk-config program.  Making developers learn autoconf seems
> a bit much.  Is autoconf going to be required learning for making Gnome
> applications?   Will we be able to create a hello world Gnome
> application with a makefile under 10 lines?
> 

You can, but for any "real" application you sort of need the autoconf
stuff, unless you enjoy writing huge makefiles by hand. 

I think once you get gnome-config going you will be OK, however.

> 3 - Is gnome-config supposed to work?
> `gnome-config --libs` doesn't work like `gtk-config --libs`  Actually,
> I get no output.  Maybe I expected it to build the library list
> required to link a gnome application.  Is it supposed to?

It takes an argument, the library you want the libs for. For example, 
 gnome-config --libs gnomeui

Try gnome-config --help, and Miguel also wrote a man page for the next
version of gnome-libs.

Optional libraries install a magic file to add themselves to the libraries
gnome-config knows about. For example, if you install bonobo you can type:
 gnome-config --libs bonobo

gnome-config --help has a little blurb about this.

HTH,
Havoc