Re: compile failure

[Marc Williams <marcw onlymooo com>]

I would've replied directly but you sent your response only to the list
so I had to read it in the digest.  I did my cutting / pasting from
there.

Thanks for the thorough explanation.  This sort of thing helps a lot to
better understand what's going on.  As I mentioned in another reply, the
switches you mention are what did the trick.

I'm a little confused though about how come I am able to run
gnome-config so easily but yet ./configure can't figure it out.  But
then again I'm not a coder so it would probably be over my head.....



> Message: 9
> Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 09:53:54 +0000
> From: Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>
> To: gnome-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: compile failure
> 
> ... 
> > The instructions say to run ./configure with the PREFIX switch like
> > this:  --prefix=/path/to/gnome.  I had omitted this switch hoping that
> > the defaults would work.  Evidently they don't.  What I don't understand
> > is what is a /path/to/gnome?  Slocate tells me I've got gnome all over
> > the place.  Which path would I use?
> > 
> 
> It's to do with where Gnome thinks it should live on the filesystem.
> Different distros (and different people building their own) have
> different ideas about that. There is something called the Filesystem
> Hierarchy Standard, which applies to Linux and to which distros are
> moving. But interpretations of it differ. If you think that Gnome 
> is an "add-on application software package", you will think that 
> Gnome should live in /opt. If you think that it's a standard part 
> of the system (and that it's shareable, and read-only, and so on,
> which are also part of the requirements: the FHS is big!), you 
> might put it in /usr. 
> 
> If you do ./configure with no arguments, the results will end
> up in /usr/local, because this is traditionally where you stick
> stuff that was locally compiled. 
> 
> To tell it that the program you're compiling lives in /foo and
> that its configuration files are going into /plop, you would do
> 
> $ ./configure --prefix=/foo --sysconfdir=/plop
> 
> You can find out where gnome packages think they're installed
> with "gnome-config --prefix" and "gnome-config --sysconfdir".
> You can also find out other options for ./configure with 
> ./configure --help, which should list things specific for
> that app.
> 
> If you are compiling tarballs on a machine which also uses
> package management, however, there is an argument that you 
> should put them in /usr/local and not put them into wherever
> the rpms or debs put them. This avoids confusion, and avoids
> installs or upgrades via the package manager overwriting 
> stuff you put into that directory.
> 
> However, if you are already putting them in /usr/local (which
> is what happens when you use "make install" at the end of the
> compile process, and you are getting errors, something else
> must be wrong. Perhaps it is looking for a program in "all
> the usual places package managers put there"; and which you 
> have compiled from source so it's in /usr/local and ./configure
> is not seeing it. That's a guess, and probably wrong. 
> 
> You may need to post the specific errors you're getting
> for people to look at.
>