Re: why is gtk install so difficult?

[Russell Shaw <rjshaw iprimus com au>]

Steve Grimaud wrote:
> Hi,
>    I'm sorry, but the statement below by Reuben hits the nail on the 
> head for the "user."
...
> I tried building a program from source (jpilot) on RH9 (shrike). I
> encountered a "problem" with not finding GTK+ 2.0.0 or higher (although
> I believe it's somewhere on my computer). I then downloaded GTK+; then
> glib, pango, and atk+, since they had to be updated; then pkg-config,
> since it wasn't the most uptodate (according to the other
> configure/make/make install error messages). I know I installed atk+,
> but GKT+ tells me it can't find it.
>
> I give up. You have to have more than a basic understanding of the 
> operating system and general installation procedures for programs to get 
> these all to build and install.

The biggest problem is that an obscure build error means reading and
understanding a heap of things about autoconf/configure, linkers,
versions, pkg-config, and various other things that normal users
don't need for installing binaries. Users just have to accept that
until all the variations in parameters of a system are covered,
they'll have to have *some* detailed system know-how to fix
errors on their own.

If you have library objects and headers in a non-standard location,
then ./configure LDFLAGS=<paths to objects> CPPFLAGS=<paths to headers>

To find the path to atk headers: locate *atk*.h

  /usr/include/atk-1.0/atk/atk-enum-types.h
  /usr/include/atk-1.0/atk/atk.h
  /usr/include/atk-1.0/atk/atkaction.h
  ...

To find the path to atk objects: locate libatk*

  /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.a
  /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.la
  /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so
  /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0
  /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0.200.4
  ...