|  |  |  | GLib Reference Manual |  | 
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| Compiling the GLib packageCompiling the GLib Package — How to compile GLib itself | 
On UNIX, GLib uses the standard GNU build system, using autoconf for package configuration and resolving portability issues, automake for building makefiles that comply with the GNU Coding Standards, and libtool for building shared libraries on multiple platforms. The normal sequence for compiling and installing the GLib library is thus:
          ./configure
          make
          make install
        
The standard options provided by GNU autoconf may be passed to the configure script. Please see the autoconf documentation or run ./configure --help for information about the standard options.
The GTK+ documentation contains further details about the build process and ways to influence it.
Before you can compile the GLib library, 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 GLib mentioned above such as autoconf) are pkg-config and GNU make.
	    pkg-config
	    is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for
	    libraries that are used by the GLib library. (For each
	    library, a small .pc 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 pkg-config 
            needed to build GLib is mirrored in the 
	    dependencies directory
	    on the GTK+ FTP
	    site.
	  
The GTK+ makefiles will mostly work with different versions of make, however, there tends to be a few incompatibilities, so the GTK+ team recommends installing GNU make if you don't already have it on your system and using it. (It may be called gmake rather than make.)
GLib depends on a number of other libraries.
	  The GNU
	  libiconv library is needed to build GLib if your
	  system doesn't have the iconv()
	  function for doing conversion between character
	  encodings. Most modern systems should have
	  iconv(), however many older systems lack 
	  an iconv() implementation. On such systems, 
	  you must install the libiconv library. This can be found at:
	  http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv.	  
	
	  If your system has an iconv() implementation but
	  you want to use libiconv instead, you can pass the
	  --with-libiconv option to configure. This forces
	  libiconv to be used.  
	
	  Note that if you have libiconv installed in your default include
	  search path (for instance, in /usr/local/), but
	  don't enable it, you will get an error while compiling GLib because
	  the iconv.h that libiconv installs hides the
	  system iconv. 
	
If you are using the native iconv implementation on Solaris instead of libiconv, you'll need to make sure that you have the converters between locale encodings and UTF-8 installed. At a minimum you'll need the SUNWuiu8 package. You probably should also install the SUNWciu8, SUNWhiu8, SUNWjiu8, and SUNWkiu8 packages.
The native iconv on Compaq Tru64 doesn't contain support for UTF-8, so you'll need to use GNU libiconv instead. (When using GNU libiconv for GLib, you'll need to use GNU libiconv for GNU gettext as well.) This probably applies to related operating systems as well.
	  The libintl library from the GNU gettext
	  package is needed if your system doesn't have the
	  gettext() functionality for handling
	  message translation databases.
	
A thread implementation is needed, unless you want to compile GLib without thread support, which is not recommended. The thread support in GLib can be based upon several native thread implementations, e.g. POSIX threads, DCE threads or Solaris threads.
In addition to the normal options, the configure script in the GLib library supports these additional arguments:
configure  [[--enable-debug=[no|minimum|yes]]] [[--disable-gc-friendly] |  [--enable-gc-friendly]] [[--disable-mem-pools] |  [--enable-mem-pools]] [[--disable-threads] |  [--enable-threads]] [[--with-threads=[none|posix|dce|solaris|win32]]] [[--disable-included-printf] |  [--enable-included-printf]] [[--disable-visibility] |  [--enable-visibility]] [[--disable-gtk-doc] |  [--enable-gtk-doc]] [[--disable-man] |  [--enable-man]]
--enable-debug. 
         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
         runtime debugging.
         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
         --enable-debug=no should not
         be used for stable releases of GLib.
        
--disable-gc-friendly and
          --enable-gc-friendly. 
          When enabled all memory freed by the application,
          but retained by GLib for performance reasons
          is set to zero, thus making deployed garbage
          collection or memory profiling tools detect
          unlinked memory correctly. This will make GLib
          slightly slower and is thus disabled by default.
        
--disable-mem-pools and
          --enable-mem-pools. 
        Many small chunks of memory are often allocated via collective pools
        in GLib and are cached after release to speed up reallocations.
        For sparse memory systems this behaviour is often inferior, so
        memory pools can be disabled to avoid excessive caching and force
        atomic maintenance of chunks through the g_malloc()
        and g_free() functions. Code currently affected by 
        this:
        
GList, GSList, GNode, GHash allocations. The functions g_list_push_allocator(), g_list_pop_allocator(), g_slist_push_allocator(), g_slist_pop_allocator(), g_node_push_allocator() and g_node_pop_allocator() are not available
GMemChunks become basically non-effective
GSignal disables all caching (potentially very slow)
         GType doesn't honour the 
         GTypeInfo 
         n_preallocs field anymore
        
         the GBSearchArray flag 
         G_BSEARCH_ALIGN_POWER2 becomes non-functional
        
--disable-threads and
          --enable-threads. 
           Do not compile GLib to be multi thread safe. GLib
           will be slightly faster then. This is however not
           recommended, as many programs rely on GLib being
           multi thread safe.
        
--with-threads. 
          Specify a thread implementation to use.
          
'posix' and 'dce' can be used interchangeable to mean the different versions of Posix threads. configure tries to find out, which one is installed.
'solaris' uses the native Solaris thread implementation.
                'none' means that GLib will be thread safe,
                but does not have a default thread
                implementation. This has to be supplied to
                g_thread_init() by the programmer.
              
--disable-included-printf and
           --enable-included-printf. 
          By default the configure script will try
          to auto-detect whether the C library provides a suitable set
	  of printf() functions. In detail, 
	  configure checks that the semantics of
          snprintf() are as specified by C99 and
	  that positional parameters as specified in the Single Unix
	  Specification are supported. If this not the case, GLib will
	  include an implementation of the printf() 
          family.
          These options can be used to explicitly control whether
          an implementation fo the printf() family
          should be included or not.
        
--disable-visibility and
           --enable-visibility. 
          By default, GLib uses ELF visibility attributes to optimize
          PLT table entries if the compiler supports ELF visibility
          attributes. A side-effect of the way in which this is currently
          implemented is that any  header change forces a full 
          recompilation, and missing includes may go unnoticed. 
          Therefore, it makes sense to turn this feature off while
          doing GLib development, even if the compiler supports ELF
          visibility attributes. The --disable-visibility 
          option allows to do that.
        
--disable-gtk-doc and
          --enable-gtk-doc. 
          By default the configure script will try
          to auto-detect whether the
          gtk-doc package is installed.  If
          it is, then it will use it to extract and build the
          documentation for the GLib library.  These options
          can be used to explicitly control whether
          gtk-doc should be
          used or not.  If it is not used, the distributed,
          pre-generated HTML files will be installed instead of
          building them on your machine.
        
--disable-man and
          --enable-man. 
          By default the configure script will try
          to auto-detect whether xsltproc 
          and the necessary Docbook stylesheets are installed.  If
          they are, then it will use them to rebuild the included
          man pages from the XML sources.  These options can be used 
          to explicitly control whether man pages should be rebuilt
          used or not. The distribution includes pre-generated man 
          pages.
        
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