Re: stuck while installing GTK+ ,,, need help

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Friday 13 October 2006 11:48, Murray Cumming wrote:
> More importantly, the correct answer is almost always "Use your distro's
> packages".
>
> Building from source is difficult and requires you to know what you are
> doing, and requires you to enjoy the problems a bit.

With GNOME itself that is wise advice, as its (now undocumented) dependencies 
and build order make it a pig to install from source.  I have some scripts to 
do this which require work every time a new minor number revision comes out.

I know that Tor is mainly concerned with Windows (about which I know little so 
far as concerns GTK+), but I have to say that I have never had any difficulty 
building GTK+ on unix-like OSs from the early 1.2 days.  It has few 
dependencies, no obvious "gotchas" and its build order is predictable.  Most 
build problems are nothing to do with GTK+ but reflect the fact that the 
poster is probably new to such OSs and doesn't understand how to compile a 
program or library of any kind and he happens to have first tried with GTK+.

I wish though that OS distributions included /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig in the 
PKG_CONFIG_PATH by default.  That seems to account for at least half the 
problems from people new to compiling libraries.

Chris