Broken configure scripts? gnome-libs-1.0.8 and imlib-1.9.4 compile problems

["Dave Neuer" <dneuer futuristics net>]

Hi,

I'm having problems compiling the latest tarball sources on my Debian Linux
system
(Debian 2.0 upgraded to Linux kernel 2.2.5 and Glibc 2.1).  I have followed
the
recommended order of installation on the GNOME RedHat tarball insallation
guide
page (http://www.gnome.org/start/gnometar.shtml), but have run into the
following
difficulties.

When building Imlib, the 'configure' script can't seem to find gif_lib.h,
even though it's
in my include path (/usr/include, to be precise).  I always get the message
from
configure that native GIF (and TIFF) support will be disabled (for TIFF,
it's because
it couldn't compile/run the test program).  I've tried to glean what the
configure script
is doing, but I'm not a shell programmer so it looks like gibberish to me
(all the
filename tranformations and redirected input/output, etc).

Subsequently, when trying to compile gnome-libs, I get errors in
gnome-stock.c
saying that the imlib_* variables in the initializers for the entries_data
array of _default_entries_data structs aren't defined and aren't constants.
I can't tell if these two problems are related.

Incidentally, the configure scripts for many of the packages don't seem to
work correctly on my system: for instance, almost without exception,
gnome-related configure scripts which build test gtk+ or imlib applications
fail at that stage -- specifically, they report that *_config tells them
that the required version of * is too low.  However, if do, for example,
'<path>/gtk_config --version' myself, it correctly reports it's version, and
if I use the --disable-gtktest and --disable-imlibtest options for the
relevant scripts, 'configure' reports that I _do_ have the required
versions, and builds just fine.  This in combination with the imlib gif/tiff
problem above make me think that the failure is actually in
compiling/running the test app, and that the configure scripts (maybe due to
a mismatched if/else pair) are reporting the error as having occurred in the
wrong place.

So does anyone know:
1) whether imlib not building in native gif & tiff support is likely causing
gnome-libs not to compile;
2) what I have to do in this case to get gnome-libs to compile; and/or
3) why the configure scripts routinely fail?

Any help is appreciated.


Dave Neuer
Software Engineer
Futuristics Labs, Inc.
www.futuristics.net