Re: why is gtk install so difficult?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 11:13, Chad A Daelhousen wrote:
> In that case, is there any situation in which /usr/bin/pkg-config should
> NOT look in /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig? Havoc, as maintainer, what are
> your thoughts? Should this be changed?

/usr/local/lib isn't in /etc/ld.so.conf either (pkgconfig should have an
/etc/pkgconfig.conf, though right now it's hardcoded).

I don't believe listing /usr/local is always what you want; e.g. I run
in either my special-prefix environment or the stock /usr environment
from RPMs on the same machine, and if in the stock /usr environment I do
*not* want it contaminated with libs from the special prefix.

When it comes down to it, to use /usr/local or any other prefix you are
going to have to understand --prefix, PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and so
forth. I'm not sure PKG_CONFIG_PATH adds to that burden much, it seems
to me the right thing is for pkgconfig to work in exactly the same way
as those other things.

There's really just one trick to learn, which is to have a script like
the one I've posted that sets up the paths. jhbuild even comes with
"jhbuild run" to do this. Then to use the stuff in your prefix you do
"myscript appname" and to use normal appname you omit the script.

I would say someone who doesn't understand this is probably expecting to
install GTK with no args to configure and have it replace their system
GTK. So at that point magically building things vs. /usr/local is hardly
going to save them. The solution would probably be to default to
--prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc.

Probably installing to overwrite your system stuff is a bad idea, but
it's what Owen usually suggests as the simplest thing.

>From my standpoint on the receiving end of lots of bug reports, I'd
really prefer a rule like "if you don't know shell scripting, basic
UNIX, some C programming, don't try building your own software" ;-)
The source-based distributions and people randomly hosing up
binary-based distributions with their own compiles are a big source of
user error bugs. "XYZ randomly acts weird/segfaults/etc." You really do
have to understand things to be building from source.

Re: /usr/local, an interesting observation - I broke the /usr/local case
in dbus for a while and nobody noticed. Almost all developers specify
--prefix instead of leaving configure with no args.

Havoc