Re: variables

[Michael Ekstrand <mekstran scl ameslab gov>]

On Aug 14, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Bill Cunningham wrote:
>     Can someone help explain to me the LD_LIBRARIES_PATH variables?
> Pkg-config recognizes several glib related libraries and exports  
> libs. I can
> get pkg-config to spit out some compiler switches but I don't know  
> where to
> put them. I think the above stated variable is the sticky point.

That variable is a variable used by the dynamic linker to locate  
shared libraries at run time.

About the pkg-config compiler switches, etc.: you don't put them  
anywhere.  You make sure that configure can find pkg-config, and pkg- 
config can find its module definition files (the *.pc files in  
$PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig), and then configure asks pkg-config for the  
compiler flags and inserts them appropriately.

You can, for some collection of pkg-config-checked packages FOO, set  
FOO_CFLAGS and FOO_LIBS (or FOO_LDFLAGS, not sure which; output of a  
configure script made using a recent version of the pkg-config  
autoconf macros will document this) to the output of pkg-config -- 
cflags and pkg-config --libs, respectively; however, you shouldn't  
actually need to do this.  If pkg-config is in your PATH, and  
PKG_CONFIG_PATH is set appropriately if necessary (if you can do pkg- 
config --cflags glib-2.0 and get meaningful output, then it probably  
is), then configure should be finding glib properly.

Now, where the LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or LIBRARIES_PATH - is that a typo,  
or does your distro use a name other than the one used by Debian?)  
variable comes in:  several of the gtk-related packages do a check to  
make sure the necessary libraries can not only be linked against, but  
also found by the dynamic linker at run time, by compiling and  
running a test program.  If this is the stage where configure is  
failing (some output from configure would be useful in determining  
that), then setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the lib directory where the  
glib libraries are located should allow ATK to finish configuring.

HTH,
Michael