Versions Questions

[Michael Vanecek <mike mjv com>]

I've spent the last few days fumbling around with GTK installation,
GNOME installation, and E installation, all from rpm's excepting
LibPropList. In this time I've made a mess, did a clean re-install, and
made a slightly more organized mess in my experimentation and efforts to
understand more about libraries.

Now I'm ready to wipe the slate clean again and do a re-install. (RH 5.2
w/updates courtesy CheapBytes). With what I have gone through, I've come
to the idea that the stock gtk+-1.0* and glib-1.0* are pretty much
useless and redundant to someone installing the more recent v1.1* series
in addition to the suplimentary gtk+10/glib10 libs to allow backwards
compatibility. Am I correct? If not, please clarify...

When I re-install, with the above in mind, I'd be better off not
installing the original gtk/glib and associated apps when I first load
the system, prefering instead to install the gtk+10/glib10 later AND
THEN installing the gtk+-1.0* and glib-1.0* dependant apps. Will this
work? If you have a better idea, please let me know...

And once I get those settled in I turn my attention to the variety of
v1.1* versions and apps linked to one or the other...is it safe to
install v1.1.11, v1.1.12, v1.1.13 and so forth without conflicts? Reason
being, I have v1.1.14 and am trying to install an app RPM that is linked
to v1.1.13 and giving me an error. Is this similar then to the libc5 and
libc6 setup, and if so, will I have problems running make on an app
that's linked to one or the other various v1.1* versions of gtk+/glib
with multiple versions installed? If these versions are exlusive and
non-tolerant to previous/post versions, then what is the easiest
workaround to using different programs that require different libs - or
if the difference in the libs isn't enough to break apps written for
previous v1.1* versions - how do I get rpm's to install linked to the
current version?

And finally, for you programmers - what's the simplest way to take a
dynamically linked program and convert it to statically linked? I'm
building a second box which I wish to have a consistent set of libs in
(meaning I need to keep my curious paws out of the ftp sites on this
one) and am considering taking a few of the progs I use on my
"exploration" box and statically linking them to the libs and
transfering them to my productivity workstation. I've downloaded
statically linked apps, and with the newer hardware, the overhead isn't
too objectionable. I have some dock.apps written using various versions
of GTK that I would like to transfer over without too much fuss...

Forgive me if these questions seem impossibly easy to you - the
documentation I've researched so far was written by experts for experts
with assumptions of knowledge, so while the theory of the documentation
makes some sense, I'm a little in the dark as to execution...I'm an
experienced user, but an inexperienced programer/administrator.

Thanks for your help...
Mike