Re: A FAQ? What do I need to build GTK+ these days?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Rick Campbell <rick campbellcentral org> writes:
> Where can I find a complete list of the packages required to build
> GTK+?  I've been going through an iterative process starting with gtk+
> and glib, then pulling in pkgconfig, then pango, and currently I'm
> staring at:
>   Unknown package 'atk'
>   configure: error:
>   *** Accessibility Tookit not found. Accessibility Toolkit is required
>   *** to build GTK+.

You know you are getting the unstable/development version?

GTK 1.2 has the same dependencies it has always had.

> However, I can't find anything on www.gtk.org to indicate where I might
> find such a beast and there's no clear indication that this is anything
> more than the next in an ongoing series of dependencies.

ATK is the accessibility toolkit to support blind users, people with
difficulty typing, etc. See http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/
You can download ATK from ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v1.3, same as the
rest of GTK.

There are good reasons for all the dependencies; if you have a
suggestion for how to get the same functionality without them, by all
means make that suggestion. "Don't support disabled users" or "don't
support internationalization" are not acceptable suggestions though,
I'll tell you in advance. ;-)

> I've built GTK+ before, albeit on a Slackware rather than SuSE system as
> I'm doing now.  I don't remember running into quite so many
> dependencies.  Is there an active attempt to depend on as many external
> packages as possible? 

Yes. You've figured it out; that is our primary goal.

> Is there someplace that contains a complete list
> of the things that must be gathered up before attempting to build GTK+
> these days?
> 

ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v1.3/dependencies provides the image libs.
ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v1.3/extras has pkg-config, though
pkgconfig.sourceforge.net has a newer version.

Unless we forget, we'll probably put libiconv there too for systems
that need it, and document the dependencies, by the time 1.3 is
released as stable. It's not finished at the moment though so isn't
super-productized.

I spent several days this week preparing a giant tarball with
glib/pango/atk/gtk+ and a single configure/make pass, so the next
unstable GTK release should have that available.

Havoc