glib/INSTALL.md

Simple install procedure

tar xf glib-*.tar.gz                    # unpack the sources
cd glib-*                               # change to the toplevel directory
meson _build                            # configure the build
ninja -C _build                         # build GLib

# Become root if necessary

ninja -C _build install                 # install GLib

Requirements

GLib requires a C90-compliant (but not necessarily C99-compliant) C compiler and libc. On UNIX-like systems, it also assumes compliance with at least the original 1990 version of POSIX.

GLib-2.0 requires pkg-config, which is tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for libraries. (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.) Information about pkg-config can be found at:

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig/

Meson (http://mesonbuild.com/) is also required. If your distribution does not package a new enough version of Meson, it can be installed using pip.

In order to implement conversions between character sets, GLib requires an implementation of the standard iconv() routine. Most modern systems will have a suitable implementation, 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.

Finally, for message catalog handling, GLib requires an implementation of gettext(). If your system doesn't provide this functionality, you should use the libintl library from the GNU gettext package, available from:

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/

Support for extended attributes and SELinux in GIO requires libattr and libselinux.

Some of the mimetype-related functionality in GIO requires the update-mime-database and update-desktop-database utilities, which are part of shared-mime-info and desktop-file-utils, respectively.

GObject uses libffi to implement generic marshalling functionality.

The Nitty-Gritty

Complete information about installing GLib can be found in the file:

docs/reference/glib/html/glib-building.html

Or online at:

https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-building.html

Installation directories

The location of the installed files is determined by the --prefix and --exec-prefix options given to configure. There are also more detailed flags to control individual directories. However, the use of these flags is not tested.

One particular detail to note, is that the architecture-dependent include file glibconfig.h is installed in $libdir/glib-2.0/include/.

.pc files for the various libraries are installed in $libdir/pkgconfig to provide information when compiling other packages that depend on GLib. If you set PKG_CONFIG_PATH so that it points to this directory, then you can get the correct include flags and library flags for compiling a GLib application with:

pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0
pkg-config --libs glib-2.0

This is the only supported way of determining the include and library flags for building against GLib.

Cross-compiling GLib

Information about cross-compilation of GLib can be found in the file:

docs/reference/glib/html/glib-cross-compiling.html

Or online at:

https://developer.gnome.org/glib/stable/glib-cross-compiling.html