building.sgml

This GTK+ version 2.12.3. GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

<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+