installing a gtkmm development environment

[Mitchell Laks <mlaks verizon net>]

Dear gtkmm cognisenti!

I am running debian sid. I have found that it is useful to install source 
packages to learn development as
it is often  __not__ as good when all you have is the distro's packages...

I had this with qt3 in the past.

Now that I have switched to gtkmm (as well as gtk2-perl), I have tried to 
compile and install a model environment. I have not found any howto so this 
is what I did and this is where I am stuck.

I downloaded for installation in the environment the  following packages
atk-1.10.3.tar          glibmm-2.8.6.tar  gtkmm-2.8.5.tar        
jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz    libpng-1.2.8.tar      pango-1.10.4.tar 
cairo-1.0.2.tar.gz  glib-2.8.5.tar  gtk+-2.8.17.tar   gtkmm_hello-2.4.1.tar  
libglademm-2.6.2.tar  libsigc++-2.0.17.tar  tiff-3.7.4.tar.gz

and set up a user for development.

I decided to use --preferences=/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/local as my ./configure 
option.

I realize that I have to set up environmental variable 
LD_LOAD_LIBRARY=/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/local/lib
I realize that I have to set up environmental variable 
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/local/lib/pkgconfig

I installed the packages one by one ... including gtk+ ... up to gtkmm. They 
compiled and installed correctly. I am only having trouble gtkmm.

At first I had errors that complained about tiff variables in cairo.
I wondered cause I had compiled it. and then I noticed that the linker was 
looking at the wrong libcairo (the debian one... /usr/lib/libcairo). So I  
(apt-get remove libcairo2) removed the native libcairo2 libraries from debian 
and now I have errors with
libcairo itself.

Note that the cairo libraries are of course in 
the /home/mlaks/stable_gtk/local/lib directory

mlaks Rashi:~/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5$ make
make  all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5'
Making all in tools
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5/tools'
Making all in m4
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5/tools/m4'
make[3]: Nothing to be done for `all'.
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5/tools/m4'
Making all in extra_defs_gen
make[3]: Entering directory 
`/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5/tools/extra_defs_gen'
/bin/sh ../../libtool --tag=CXX --mode=link g++  -g -O2 -Wall   -o 
generate_extra_defs  
generate_defs_gtk.o  -L/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/local/lib -lglibmm-2.4 -lsigc-2.0 -lgtk-x11-2.0 -lgdk-x11-2.0 -latk-1.0 -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lm -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lcairo -lgobject-2.0 -lgmodule-2.0 -ldl -lglib-2.0   -lglibmm_generate_extra_defs-2.4
libtool: link: cannot find the library `/usr/lib/libcairo.la' or unhandled 
argument `/usr/lib/libcairo.la'
make[3]: *** [generate_extra_defs] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory 
`/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5/tools/extra_defs_gen'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5/tools'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/mlaks/stable_gtk/gtkmm-2.8.5'
make: *** [all] Error 2



What can I do. Any howtos to read on doing this....

Thanks,
MItchell