Re: glib install problems

[John Cupitt <john cupitt ng-london org uk>]

Anthony DiSante wrote:
> As a related question, do most people have multiple versions of glib 
> (and friends) installed?  My slackware 8.1 came with version 1.x, at 
> /usr.  I upgraded to gnome 2.4 a while ago, which gave me new glib 
> stuff, also at /usr.  Now the newer stuff wants to go to /usr/local by 
> default.

I have three gtks installed: I use a (rather old) suse 8 for development, which came with gtk-1.2 in /usr. I've built my own gtk-1.2 with debugging turned on which I have in /usr/local (handy for development). Plus I've patched my X enough to be able to build gtk-2.4, also in /usr/local. For everything to work with multiple installs you need to set (at least) PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ld.so.conf and PKG_CONFIG_PATH correctly, which can be tricky. Fortunately configure is smart enough these days to detect most misconfiguration.

The gtk-2.4 install was painful since it involved replacing large chunks of my old X with modern versions which can do XRender, xft2, fontconfig and so on. It took about a day of fiddling and in retrospect that day would have been better spent simply buying a newer distro and installing that. In my opinion, installing gtk2 on an old machine is awkward enough to be developer-only.

I don't this this is gtk2's fault: on an out of date machine, you'd expect to have to update a lot of stuff to get something as shiney as gtk2 working. On a suse 9 box here it was just "configure; make; make install".

> Slackware doesn't really have a package manager, and I install 
> everything from source ...

I know this is maybe not a helpful thing to say (idiots are always recommending distro switches), but have you considered gentoo? It's a from-source thing, with a good package manager. Just type "emerge gtk2" and everything will be rebuilt and installed for you (though it may take a fair while and a lot of bandwidth).

John