Re: What goes wrong with glib?

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2004 at 11:31:26PM -0700 or thereabouts, Bahram Alinezhad wrote:
> > Thank you for your help: "Mike Newman" & "Carsten
> Weinberg",
> 
> But, glib is required by about 100 other packages in
> the system; Should I completely uninstall the current
> version of gnome and many other applications?
> 
> This is the output of "rpm -qa|fgrep glib":
> glib-1.2.10-10
> glibc-common-2.3.2-11.9
> glibc-2.3.2-11.9
> glib2-2.2.1-1
> glibc-devel-2.3.2-11.9
> glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.10

Ah. Never confuse glib with glibc. glib (no 'c') is used by
Gnome programs, mostly. If you remove it, Gnome programs may
not work, but the system as a whole will.

glibc is used by just about everything on the system. Never
try to remove it unless you know exactly what you're doing:
things can break badly.

So what you have in your results is a mixture of glib-1.x
(probably there for compatibility with old Gnome programs),
glib2 (this is the glib used for Gnome 2), and glibc.

You have a glib2, version 2.2.1, already. I am curious
why you need to compile a newer one. If you are trying to
install something else which relies upon it, then I would
try installing the matching -devel rpm as Mike suggested:
it will be glib2-devel-2.2.1-1.rpm.

Or were you trying to install a Gnome beta? I have done
this, but I haven't done it from tarballs. I tend to use 
jhbuild, because that does all the nasty ldconf (and so on) 
for me.

If you are installing a beta and want to retain your
working rpms, one trick I have found is to do this.

Make a directory called /opt/something-not-already-used:
/opt/gnome2/ is a common one. Use chown to assign
ownership of the directory to you: chown user.user /opt/gnome2/
(where user is your account name).

Then do ./configure --prefix=/opt for everything. (*)
And you can do everything as your normal user. I hate being
root when building things like this, because I do not
want to scribble all over working binaries. This way,
everything ends up in /opt (which I don't normally use),
and because I am a normal user, I can't accidentally
scribble over other parts of the system.

Some people use ~/gnome2 or ~/bin instead of /opt/gnome2.
Same reasoning.

Telsa

* There are other arguments you need for ./configure, I
think. I remember --prefix, but have forgotten the rest.
You will need someone who has successfully built a recent
Gnome beta to tell you what they are.