Re: installing gtk+

[Guy Harris <gharris flashcom net>]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2000 at 12:32:56PM +0100, Chris Wareham wrote:
> Xt isn't required by GTK+. I've run ldd and nm on the libraries,
> and none of them are linked against Xt or contain any Xt symbols.
> I assume this is the configure scripts way of checking that the
> X headers and libraries are installed.

Yes, it's probably AC_PATH_X_DIRECT, which is a macro used by AC_PATH_X;
perhaps it's afraid that -lXt might not be installed - although, as per
your later comment, I'd consider any X install that *doesn't* include it
to be completely broken - at least on a system on which you want to
build X applications, that being the place where you'd run a configure
script that uses AC_PATH_X).

Not all X applications require -lXt (GTK+, Qt, and other non-Xt-based
toolkits don't require it, so applications written using those toolkits
probably don't, either), but it *is*, I think, an X Consortium (or
whatever x.org is called these days) standard, and any application using
an Xt-based toolkit (Athena, Motif, etc.) requires it.

> A better check would be
> to test compile a raw Xlib program seeing as this is what GTK+
> really depends on.

However, GTK+'s configure script is using the standard autoconf macro
AC_PATH_X - which is probably the right thing to do, given that it might
well have to duplicate a significant amount of what AC_PATH_X does if it
didn't do so - so it checks for "-lXt" anyway.