Re: Gnome developer questions

[Dave Camp <campd oit edu>]

Eric Harlow <linuxgeek@yahoo.com> writes:

> 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.
Those applications use the autoconf/automake pair, and their makefiles are 
generated using the configure script in the gnome-libs root.  They also
assume they are in the gnome-libs tree when linking (ie they use relative
pathnames instead of using gnome-config).

> 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?
It's possible (I've done it while testing little things).  But whether
you would want to is questionable - autoconf has some benefits (which
I won't go into right now).  You do it pretty much the same as you do 
with GTK programs - with gnome-config.  See next answer.

> 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?
You must supply a library name to gnome-config.  So if you want (for example) 
the gnomeui library, you would use `gnome-config gnomeui --libs`.  Other than
that requirement, it's very similar to gtk-config.

Generally, to get your average non-corba aware gnome app, you'll need to use 
gnome-config with 'glib', 'gtk', 'gnome', and 'gnomeui'.  Your mileage may
vary.

Hope that helps,
-dave

-- 
Dave Camp             Student, Oregon Institute of Technology
campd@oit.edu         (541) 885-0261
http://davec.dhs.org  "Machines have no conscience" - Queensryche