Wishing for a guide to a happy life with gtk/gtk+/glib

[Kjell Grindalen <kjellg mint no>]

I was wondering wether there are some easy and right way of handling
the issue of gtk/gtk+/glib upgrading and installing

I have understood that the file /usr/local/bin/gtk-config is where
most of the gnome/gtk applications are getting their info on the
current version of gtk installed, doing a gtk-config --version currently
yields 1.1.12 on my sytem, before this I had many other gtk's installed
among them gtk+-1.0.6, I upgraded as a good boy from my RH5.2 clean base
and decided after installing gtk+-1.1.12 & glib-1.1.12  from rpm that I
was to rpm -e the
other I had installed, and everything went perfect, and gnome+e is working
as a charm, and well its all nice and dandy :)

I have a line in my /etc/ld.so.conf that says /usr/local/lib
and I have been running ldconfig -v a couple of times
But still all apps that i try to compile stops at configure with the
message that they dont belive either that its in my LD_LIBRARY_PATH or
that something else is wrong.

So my question is, is there a way for me to clean up this and have a
healthy gtk/glib life ?

mvh

Kjell