path: root/docs/reference/gtk/building.sgml

<refentry id="gtk-building" revision="6 Sept 2001">
<refmeta>
<refentrytitle>Compiling the GTK+ libraries</refentrytitle>
<manvolnum>3</manvolnum>
<refmiscinfo>GTK Library</refmiscinfo>
</refmeta>

<refnamediv>
<refname>Compiling the GTK+ Libraries</refname>
<refpurpose>
How to compile GTK+ itself
</refpurpose>
</refnamediv>
  <refsect1 id="overview">
    <title>Building GTK+ on UNIX-like systems</title>
    <para>
      This chapter covers building and installing GTK+ on UNIX and
      UNIX-like systems such as Linux. Compiling GTK+ on Microsoft
      Windows is different in detail and somewhat more difficult to
      get going since the necessary tools aren't included with
      the operating system.
    </para>
    <para>
      Before we get into the details of how to compile GTK+, we should
      mention that in many cases, binary packages of GTK+ prebuilt for
      your operating system will be available, either from your
      operating system vendor or from independent sources. If such a
      set of packages is available, installing it will get you
      programming wih GTK+ much faster than building it yourself. In
      fact, you may well already have GTK+ installed on your system
      already.
    </para>
    <para>
      On UNIX-like systems GTK+ uses the standard GNU build system,
      using <application>autoconf</application> for package
      configuration and resolving portability issues,
      <application>automake</application> for building makefiles that
      comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and
      <application>libtool</application> for building shared libraries
      on multiple platforms.
    </para>
    <para>
      If you are building GTK+ from the distributed source packages,
      then won't need these tools installed; the necessary pieces
      of the tools are already included in the source packages. But
      it's useful to know a bit about how packages that use these
      tools work. A source package is distributed as a
      <literal>tar.gz</literal> or <literal>tar.bz2</literal> file 
      which you unpack into a directory full of the source files as follows:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      tar xvfz gtk+-2.0.0.tar.gz
      tar xvfj gtk+-2.0.0.tar.bz2
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      In the toplevel of the directory that is created, there will be
      a shell script called <filename>configure</filename> which
      you then run to take the template makefiles called
      <filename>Makefile.in</filename> in the package and create
      makefiles customized for your operating system. The <filename>configure</filename>
      script can be passed various command line arguments to determine how
      the package is built and installed. The most commonly useful
      argument is the <systemitem>--prefix</systemitem> argument which
      determines where the package is installed. To install a package
      in <filename>/opt/gtk</filename> you would run configure as:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      A full list of options can be found by running
      <filename>configure</filename> with the
      <systemitem>--help</systemitem> argument. In general, the defaults are
      right and should be trusted. After you've run
      <filename>configure</filename>, you then run the
      <command>make</command> command to build the package and install
      it.
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      make
      make install
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      If you don't have permission to write to the directory you are
      installing in, you may have to change to root temporarily before
      running <literal>make install</literal>. Also, if you are
      installing in a system directory, on some systems (such as
      Linux), you will need to run <command>ldconfig</command> after
      <literal>make install</literal> so that the newly installed
      libraries will be found.
    </para>
    <para>
      Several environment variables are useful to pass to set before
      running configure. <envar>CPPFLAGS</envar> contains options to
      pass to the C compiler, and is used to tell the compiler where
      to look for include files. The <envar>LDFLAGS</envar> variable
      is used in a similar fashion for the linker. Finally the
      <envar>PKG_CONFIG_PATH</envar> environment variable contains
      a search path that <command>pkg-config</command> (see below)
      uses when looking for for file describing how to compile
      programs using different libraries. If you were installing GTK+
      and it's dependencies into <filename>/opt/gtk</filename>, you 
      might want to set these variables as:
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/gtk/include"
      LDFLAGS="-L/opt/gtk/lib"
      PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib/pkgconfig"
      export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS PKG_CONFIG_PATH
    </programlisting>
    <para>
      You may also need to set the <envar>LD_LIBRARY_PATH</envar>
      environment variable so the systems dynamic linker can find
      the newly installed libraries, and the <envar>PATH</envar>
      environment program so that utility binaries installed by
      the various libraries will be found.
    </para>
    <programlisting>
      LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/gtk/lib"
      PATH="/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH"
      export LD_LIBRARY_PATH PATH
    </programlisting>
  </refsect1>
  <refsect1 id="dependencies">
    <title>Dependencies</title>
    <para>
      Before you can compile the GTK+ widget toolkit, you need to have
      various other tools and libraries installed on your
      system. The two tools needed during the build process (as
      differentiated from the tools used in when creating GTK+
      mentioned above such as <application>autoconf</application>)
      are <command>pkg-config</command> and GNU make.
    </para>
    <itemizedlist>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  <ulink
	  url="http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig">pkg-config</ulink>
	  is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for
	  libraries that are used by the GTK+ libraries. (For each
	  library, a small <literal>.pc</literal> text file is installed 
          in a standard location that contains the compilation flags 
          needed for that library along with version number information.)  
          The version of <command>pkg-config</command> needed to build 
          GTK+ is mirrored in the <filename>dependencies</filename> directory
	  on the <ulink url="ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/">GTK+ FTP
	  site.</ulink>
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The GTK+ makefiles will mostly work with different versions
	  of <command>make</command>, however, there tends to be
	  a few incompatibilities, so the GTK+ team recommends
	  installing <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/software/make">GNU
	    make</ulink> if you don't already have it on your system
	  and using it. (It may be called <command>gmake</command>
	  rather than <command>make</command>.)
	</para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
    <para>
      Three of the libraries that GTK+ depends on are maintained by
      by the GTK+ team: GLib, Pango, and ATK. Other libraries are
      maintained separately.
    </para>
    <itemizedlist>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The GLib library provides core non-graphical functionality
	  such as high level data types, Unicode manipulation, and
	  an object and type system to C programs. It is available
	  from the <ulink url="ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/">GTK+
	  FTP site.</ulink>
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  <ulink url="http://www.pango.org">Pango</ulink> is a library
	  for internationalized text handling. It is available from
	  the <ulink url="ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/">GTK+ FTP
	  site.</ulink>. 
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  ATK is the Accessibility Toolkit. It provides a set of generic
	  interfaces allowing accessibility technologies such as
	  screen readers to interact with a graphical user interface.
	  It is available from the <ulink
	  url="ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/">GTK+ FTP site.</ulink>
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/">GNU
	  libiconv library</ulink> is needed to build GLib if your
	  system doesn't have the <function>iconv()</function>
	  function for doing conversion between character
	  encodings. Most modern systems should have
	  <function>iconv()</function>.
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The libintl library from the <ulink
	  url="http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/">GNU gettext
	  package</ulink> is needed if your system doesn't have the
	  <function>gettext()</function> functionality for handling
	  message translation databases.
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The <ulink
	    url="ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/">JPEG</ulink>,
	  <ulink url="http://www.libpng.org">PNG</ulink>, and
	  <ulink url="http://www.libtiff.org">TIFF</ulink> image 
          loading libraries are needed to compile GTK+. You probably 
          already have these libraries installed, but if not, the 
          versions you need are available in the 
           <filename>dependencies</filename> directory on the the
	  <ulink url="ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/dependencies/">GTK+
	    FTP site.</ulink>. (Before installing these libraries
	  from source, you should check if your operating system
	  vendor has prebuilt packages of these libraries that you
	  don't have installed.)
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The libraries from the X window system are needed to build
	  Pango and GTK+. You should already have these installed on
	  your system, but it's possible that you'll need to install
	  the development environment for these libraries that your
	  operating system vendor provides.
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  The <ulink url="http://www.fontconfig.org">fontconfig</ulink>
	  library provides Pango with a standard way of locating
	  fonts and matching them against font names. 
	</para>
      </listitem>
      <listitem>
	<para>
	  <ulink url="http://www.cairographics.org">Cairo</ulink>
          is a graphics library that supports vector graphics and image 
          compositing. Both Pango and GTK+ use cairo for much of their
          drawing.
        </para>
      </listitem>
    </itemizedlist>
  </refsect1>
  <refsect1 id="building">
    <title>Building and testing GTK+</title>
    <para>
      First make sure that you have the necessary external
      dependencies installed: <command>pkg-config</command>, GNU make,
      the JPEG, PNG, and TIFF libraries, FreeType, and, if necessary,
      libiconv and libintl. To get detailed information about building 
      these packages, see the documentation provided with the
      individual packages.
      On a Linux system, it's quite likely you'll have all of these
      installed already except for <command>pkg-config</command>.
    </para>
    <para>
      Then build and install the GTK+ libraries in the order:
      GLib, Pango, ATK, then GTK+. For each library, follow the
      steps of <literal>configure</literal>, <literal>make</literal>,
      <literal>make install</literal> mentioned above. If you're
      lucky, this will all go smoothly, and you'll be ready to
      <link linkend="gtk-compiling">start compiling your own GTK+
	applications</link>. You can test your GTK+ installation
      by running the <command>gtk-demo</command> program that
      GTK+ installs.
    </para>
    <para>
      If one of the <filename>configure</filename> scripts fails or running
      <command>make</command> fails, look closely at the error
      messages printed; these will often provide useful information
      as to what went wrong. When <filename>configure</filename>
      fails, extra information, such as errors that a test compilation
      ran into, is found in the file <filename>config.log</filename>.
      Looking at the last couple of hundred lines in this file will
      frequently make clear what went wrong. If all else fails, you
      can ask for help on the gtk-list mailing list.
      See <xref linkend="gtk-resources"/> for more information.
    </para>
  </refsect1>
      <refsect1 id="extra-configuration-options">
      <title>Extra Configuration Options</title>

      <para>
	In addition to the normal options, the
	<command>configure</command> script for the GTK+ library
	supports a number of additional arguments. (Command line
	arguments for the other GTK+ libraries are described in
	the documentation distributed with the those libraries.)

	<cmdsynopsis>
	  <command>configure</command>

	  <group>
	    <arg>--disable-modules</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-modules</arg>
	  </group>
	  <group>
	    <arg>--with-included-loaders==LOADER1,LOADER2,...</arg>
	  </group>
	  <group>
	    <arg>--enable-debug=[no|minimum|yes]</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
	    <arg>--disable-visibility</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-visibility</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
	    <arg>--disable-shm</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-shm</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
	    <arg>--disable-xim</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-xim</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
	    <arg>--disable-xim-inst</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-xim-inst</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
	    <arg>--disable-xkb</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-xkb</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
	    <arg>--disable-xinerama</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-xinerama</arg>
	  </group>
	  <group>
	    <arg>--disable-gtk-doc</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-gtk-doc</arg>
	  </group>
          <group>
            <arg>--with-xinput=[no|yes]</arg>
          </group>
	  <group>
	    <arg>--with-gdktarget=[x11|linux-fb|win32|quartz|directfb]</arg>
	  </group>
	  <group>
	    <arg>--disable-shadowfb</arg>
	    <arg>--enable-shadowfb</arg>
	  </group>
	</cmdsynopsis>
      </para>

      <formalpara>
	<title><systemitem>--disable-modules</systemitem> and
	  <systemitem>--enable-modules</systemitem></title>

	<para>
	  Normally GTK+ will try to build the GdkPixbuf image file
	  format loaders as little shared libraries that are loaded on
	  demand.  The <systemitem>--disable-modules</systemitem>
	  argument indicates that they should all be built statically
	  into the GTK+ library instead.  This is useful for
	  people who need to produce statically-linked binaries.  If
	  neither <systemitem>--disable-modules</systemitem> nor
	  <systemitem>--enable-modules</systemitem> is specified, then
	  the <command>configure</command> script will try to
	  auto-detect whether shared modules work on your system.
	</para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
	<title><systemitem>--with-included-loaders</systemitem></title>

	<para>
         This option allows you to specify which image loaders you
         want to include; for example, you might include only the PNG
         loader to create a smaller GdkPixbuf binary.
	</para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-debug</systemitem></title>
          
        <para>
         Turns on various amounts of debugging support. Setting this to 'no' 
	 disables g_assert(), g_return_if_fail(), g_return_val_if_fail() and
         all cast checks between different object types. Setting it to 'minimum'
         disables only cast checks. Setting it to 'yes' enables 
         <link linkend="GTK-Debug-Options">runtime debugging</link>. 
         The default is 'minimum'.
         Note that 'no' is fast, but dangerous as it tends to destabilize 
         even mostly bug-free software by changing the effect of many bugs 
         from simple warnings into fatal crashes. Thus 
         <option>--enable-debug=no</option> should <emphasis>not</emphasis> 
         be used for stable releases of GTK+.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-visibility</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-visibility</systemitem></title>
        <para>
          The option <systemitem>--disable-visibility</systemitem>
          turns off the use of ELF visibility attributes for linking
          optimizations. This makes sense while changing GTK+ itself,
          since the way in which GTK+ uses visibility attributes 
          forces a full rebuild of all source files for any header
          modification.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--enable-explicit-deps</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--disable-explicit-deps</systemitem></title>
        <para>
	  If <systemitem>--enable-explicit-deps</systemitem> is
	  specified then GTK+ will write the full set of libraries
	  that GTK+ depends upon into its <literal>.pc</literal> files to be used when
	  programs depending on GTK+ are linked. Otherwise, GTK+
	  only will include the GTK+ libraries themselves, and
	  will depend on system library dependency facilities to
	  bring in the other libraries.
	  By default GTK+ will disable explicit dependencies unless
	  it detects that they are needed on the system. (If you
	  specify <systemitem>--enable-static</systemitem> to force
	  building of static libraries, then explicit dependencies
	  will be written since library dependencies don't work
	  for static libraries.) Specifying
	  <systemitem>--enable-explicit-deps</systemitem> or
	  <systemitem>--enable-static</systemitem> can cause
	  compatibility
	  problems when libraries that GTK+ depends upon change
	  their versions, and should be avoided if possible.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-shm</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-shm</systemitem></title>
 
        <para>
          These options can be used to control whether GTK+ will use shared 
          memory to communicate with the X server when possible.
          The default is 'yes'.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xim</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-xim</systemitem></title>
 
        <para>
          These options can be used to control whether GTK+ will 
          be compiled with support for XIM. (The X Input Method
	  extension, used for Japanese input.) The default is yes.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xim-inst</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-xim-inst</systemitem></title>
 
        <para>
          These options determine whether GTK+ will use the 
	  XIM instantiate callback. 
          The default is 'yes', unless the host system is Solaris,
	  where <function>XRegisterIMInstantiateCallback()</function>
	  seems to cause a segfault.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xkb</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-xkb</systemitem></title>
 
        <para>
	  By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
	  to auto-detect whether the XKB extension is supported by
          the X libraries GTK+ is linked with.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
	  GTK+ will support the XKB extension. 
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--disable-xinerama</systemitem> and
          <systemitem>--enable-xinerama</systemitem></title>
     
        <para>
          By default the <command>configure</command> script will try
          to link against the Xinerama libraries if they are found.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          Xinerama should be used.
        </para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
	<title><systemitem>--disable-gtk-doc</systemitem> and
	  <systemitem>--enable-gtk-doc</systemitem></title>

	<para>
	  The <application>gtk-doc</application> package is
	  used to generate the reference documentation included
	  with GTK+. By default support for <application>gtk-doc</application> 
	  is disabled because it requires various extra dependencies
	  to be installed. If you have
	  <application>gtk-doc</application> installed and
	  are modifying GTK+, you may want to enable
	  <application>gtk-doc</application> support by passing
	  in <systemitem>--enable-gtk-doc</systemitem>. If not
	  enabled, pre-generated HTML files distributed with GTK+
	  will be installed.
	</para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
        <title><systemitem>--with-xinput</systemitem></title>
        <para>
	  Controls whether GTK+ is built with support for the XInput
	  extension. The XInput extension provides an interface
	  to extended input devices such as graphics tablets.
	  When this support is compiled in, specially written
	  GTK+ programs can get access to subpixel positions,
	  multiple simultaneous input devices, and extra "axes"
	  provided by the device such as pressure and tilt
	  information. This is only known to work well on XFree86
	  systems, though other systems do have this extension.
        </para>
      </formalpara>
      <formalpara>
	<title><systemitem>--with-gdktarget</systemitem></title>

	<para>
          Toggles between the supported backends for GDK. 
          The default is x11, unless the platform is Windows, in which
	  case the default is win32. Other supported backends are
          the quartz backend for OS X, and the DirectFB backend
          for the Linux framebuffer.
	</para>
      </formalpara>

      <formalpara>
	<title><systemitem>--disable-shadowfb</systemitem> and
	  <systemitem>--enable-shadowfb</systemitem></title>

	<para>
         Toggles shadow framebuffer support for the linux-fb target, 
         if selected.
	</para>
      </formalpara>

    </refsect1>

</refentry>

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