Re: why is gtk install so difficult?

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw iprimus com au>]

Sven Neumann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Russell Shaw <rjshaw iprimus com au> writes:
>
> > You could make an autoconf macro to check the ld.so version from
> > ldconfig -V.
>
> And how would I know that the user has libraries installed that are
> linked with a different and incompatible linker? The problem is not
> that GTK+ would depend on a specific version of the linker; that would
> be easy to check indeed. The problem is that the user messed up his
> system by mixing libraries compiled with incompatible linker versions.
> (At least that's what I believe to be the culprit). If you want to
> investigate this further, I suggest you look at the ld source code and
> grep for the particular error message.

I don't recall the specific error, but to test that libraries work,
an autoconf macro can compile and run a small program using a specific
library to see if it works. Autoconf macros can be specific to each
platform and/or test for all known implementations of ld to get a
version number.

If the user messed up their libraries *after* running ./configure, they
have only themselves to blame.