Re: Gnome Compiling Instructions a bit fuzzy

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 06:10:02PM -0500, Sean D. Rafferty wrote:
> I am attempting to compile the Gnome 2.1 sources from the tarballs to
> gain some experience with packaging and whatnot.

Building from tarballs completely avoids the packaging system (rpm) on
your box.

> My main problem is making sure the packages are "registered" (perhaps
> not the proper terminology, sorry). 

As far as getting a GNOME installation that runs, you need to have the
binaries available somewhere that the system can find them (i.e. in a
directory in your $PATH variable). The libraries that are linked in at
runtime need to be available to the library linker (see below for how to
check this).

> After the regular configure, make, make intall, I
> run the ldconfig.  As far as I know, this "registers" the packages with
> Linux (I'm using redhat 7.3).  Running pkg-config --list-all does not
> show _all_ the packages I (properly?) compiled and installed.  I've read
> about exporting a proper PKG_CONFIG_PATH and mine is currently at
> /usr/local/lib and /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig.

The ldconfig binary just tells the system where it can find various
shared libraries. It has nothing to do with pkg-config.

You don't specify where are you installing the packages, but let's
assume that it is in /usr/local. Check that /etc/ld.so.conf contains
/usr/local/lib as one of the directories it scans. Then ldconfig will
pick up the GNOME libraries for dynamic linking (which happens at _run_
time).

Meanwhile, pkg-config only knows about packages that are used to help
build other packages (so libraries). The pkg-config tool is used at
_build_ time. Again, you don't mention what problems you are seeing
(i.e. which packages are missing) and I am not psychic, so you will need
to provide more information if you expect others on the list to help
you.

> I read somewhere that you should remove older versions of a package
> before installing newer ones.  Gnome.org posts:
> 
> "If you are installing from source onto a system that has GNOME
> installed via the packaging system, please remove the packages before
> compiling."

Where does it say this (because I would like to get it
corrected/clarified)? You certainly should not be removing much from the
GNOME 1.4 line, say, since many applications still rely on that. You can
even install in parallel with other GNOME 2 releases, although that is
probably a bit difficult for you at the moment.

Malcolm

-- 
I've got a mind like a... a... what's that thing called?