Compiling the GLib packageCompiling the GLib Package — How to compile GLib itself |
Building the Library on UNIX
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.
GLib is compiled with strict aliasing disabled. It is strongly recommended that this is not re-enabled by overriding the compiler flags, as GLib has not been tested with strict aliasing and cannot be guaranteed to work.
The GTK+ documentation contains further details about the build process and ways to influence it.
Dependencies
Before you can compile the GLib library, you need to have various other tools and libraries installed on your system. If you are building from a release archive, you will need a compliant C toolchain, GNU Make, and pkg-config; if you are building directly from a Git repository clone of GLib, you will also need the GNU Autotools mentioned above.
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 GLib Makefiles make use of several features specific to GNU make, and will not build correctly with other versions of make. You will need to install it if you don't already have it on your system. (It may be called gmake rather than make.)
A UNIX build of GLib requires that the system implements at least the original 1990 version of POSIX. Beyond this, it 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 haveiconv()
, however many older systems lack aniconv()
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 theiconv.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. The thread support in GLib can be based upon POSIX threads or win32 threads.
GRegex uses the PCRE library for regular expression matching. The default is to use the system version of PCRE, to reduce the chances of security fixes going out of sync. GLib additionally provides an internal copy of PCRE in case the system version is too old, or does not support UTF-8; the internal copy is patched to use GLib for memory management and to share the same Unicode tables.
The optional extended attribute support in GIO requires the
getxattr()
family of functions that may be provided by the C library or by the standalone libattr library. To build GLib without extended attribute support, use the--disable-xattr
option.The optional SELinux support in GIO requires libselinux. To build GLib without SELinux support, use the
--disable-selinux
option.The optional support for DTrace requires the
sys/sdt.h
header, which is provided by SystemTap on Linux. To build GLib without DTrace, use the--disable-dtrace
configure option.The optional support for SystemTap can be disabled with the
--disable-systemtap
configure option. Additionally, you can control the location where GLib installs the SystemTap probes, using the--with-tapset-install-dir=DIR
configure option.
Extra Configuration Options
In addition to the normal options, the configure script in the GLib library supports these additional arguments:
--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' for stable releases, and 'yes' for development
snapshots. 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
.
By default, and with --disable-gc-friendly
as well, GLib does not clear the memory for certain objects before
they are freed. For example, GLib may decide to recycle GList nodes
by putting them in a free list. However, memory profiling and debugging
tools like Valgrind work
better if an application does not keep dangling pointers to freed
memory (even though these pointers are no longer dereferenced), or
invalid pointers inside uninitialized memory.
The --enable-gc-friendly
option makes GLib
clear memory in these situations:
When shrinking a GArray, GLib will clear the memory no longer available in the array: shrink an array from 10 bytes to 7, and the last 3 bytes will be cleared. This includes removals of single and multiple elements.
When growing a GArray, GLib will clear the new chunk of memory. Grow an array from 7 bytes to 10 bytes, and the last 3 bytes will be cleared.
The above applies to GPtrArray as well.
When freeing a node from a GHashTable, GLib will first clear the node, which used to have pointers to the key and the value stored at that node.
When destroying or removing a GTree node, GLib will clear the node, which used to have pointers to the node's value, and the left and right subnodes.
Since clearing the memory has a cost,
--disable-gc-friendly
is the 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:
GMemChunks become basically non-effective
GSignal disables all caching (potentially very slow)
GType doesn't honour the GTypeInfo
n_preallocs
field anymorethe GBSearchArray flag
G_BSEARCH_ALIGN_POWER2
becomes non-functional
--with-threads
.
Specify a thread implementation to use. Available options are
'posix' or 'win32'. Normally, configure
should be able to work out the system threads API on its own.
--with-pcre
.
Specify whether to use the internal or the system-supplied
PCRE library.
'internal' means that GRegex will be compiled to use the internal PCRE library.
'system' means that GRegex will be compiled to use the system-supplied PCRE library; this is the default setting.
Using the internal PCRE is the preferred solution if:
your system has strict resource constraints; the system-supplied PCRE has a separated copy of the tables used for Unicode handling, whereas the internal copy shares the Unicode tables used by GLib.
your system has PCRE built without some needed features, such as UTF-8 and Unicode support.
you are planning to use both GRegex and PCRE API at the same time, either directly or indirectly through a dependency; PCRE uses some global variables for memory management and other features, and if both GLib and PCRE try to access them at the same time, this could lead to undefined behavior.
--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 of the printf()
family
should be included or not.
--disable-Bsymbolic
and
--enable-Bsymbolic
.
By default, GLib uses the -Bsymbolic-functions
linker flag to avoid intra-library PLT jumps. A side-effect
of this is that it is no longer possible to override
internal uses of GLib functions with
LD_PRELOAD
. Therefore, it may make
sense to turn this feature off in some situations.
The --disable-Bsymbolic
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.
--disable-xattr
and
--enable-xattr
.
By default the configure script will try
to auto-detect whether the getxattr()
family of functions is available. If it is, then extended
attribute support will be included in GIO. These options can
be used to explicitly control whether extended attribute
support should be included or not. getxattr()
and friends can be provided by glibc or by the standalone
libattr library.
--disable-selinux
and
--enable-selinux
.
By default the configure script will
auto-detect if libselinux is available and include
SELinux support in GIO if it is. These options can be
used to explicitly control whether SELinux support should
be included.
--disable-dtrace
and
--enable-dtrace
.
By default the configure script will
detect if DTrace support is available, and use it.
--disable-systemtap
and
--enable-systemtap
.
This option requires DTrace support. If it is available, then
the configure script will also check for
the presence of SystemTap.
--enable-coverage
and
--disable-coverage
.
Enable the generation of coverage reports for the GLib tests.
This requires the lcov frontend to gcov from the
Linux Test Project.
To generate a coverage report, use the lcov make target. The
report is placed in the glib-lcov
directory.
--with-runtime-libdir=RELPATH
.
Allows specifying a relative path to where to install the runtime
libraries (meaning library files used for running, not developing,
GLib applications). This can be used in operating system setups where
programs using GLib needs to run before e.g. /usr
is mounted.
For example, if LIBDIR
is /usr/lib
and
../../lib
is passed to
--with-runtime-libdir
then the
runtime libraries are installed into /lib
rather
than /usr/lib
.
--with-python=PATH
.
Allows specifying the Python interpreter to use, either as an absolute path,
or as a program name. GLib can be built with Python 2 (at least version 2.7)
or, preferably, with Python 3.