Beyond Linux® From Scratch - Version 7.7

Chapter 9. General Libraries

GLib-2.42.1

Introduction to GLib

The GLib package contains a low-level libraries useful for providing data structure handling for C, portability wrappers and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading and an object system.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-7.7 platform.

Package Information

GLib Dependencies

Required

libffi-3.2.1 and Python-2.7.9 or Python-3.4.2

Recommended

PCRE-8.36 (built with Unicode properties)

Optional

D-Bus-1.8.16 (required to run the tests), elfutils-0.161, FAM library, and GTK-Doc-1.21

Additional Runtime Dependencies

Quoted directly from the INSTALL file: “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-1.4 and desktop-file-utils-0.22, respectively.

User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/glib2

Installation of GLib

Install GLib by running the following commands: 

./configure --prefix=/usr --with-pcre=system &&
make

The GLib test suite requires desktop-file-utils in order to run. However, desktop-file-utils requires GLib in order to compile; therefore, you must first install GLib and then run the test suite.

Now, as the root user: 

make install

You should now install desktop-file-utils-0.22 and proceed to run the test suite.

To test the results, after installed the package, issue: make -k check. The tests need to be run in a graphical environment. Some tests may fail, for unknown reasons. One test (regex) fails when using the system pcre package.

Command Explanations

--with-pcre=system: This switch causes the build to use a system-provided version of the PCRE library instead of an internal version.

--enable-gtk-doc: Use this parameter if GTK-Doc is installed and you wish to rebuild and install the API documentation.

--with-python=python3: Add this switch if you want GLib to use Python3 instead of Python2.

Contents

Installed Programs: gapplication, gdbus, gdbus-codegen, gio-querymodules, glib-compile-resources, glib-compile-schemas, glib-genmarshal, glib-gettextize, glib-mkenums, gobject-query, gresource, gsettings, gtester, and gtester-report
Installed Libraries: libgio-2.0.so, libglib-2.0.so, libgmodule-2.0.so, libgobject-2.0.so, and libgthread-2.0.so
Installed Directories: /usr/include/gio-unix-2.0, /usr/include/glib-2.0, /usr/lib/gio, /usr/lib/glib-2.0, /usr/share/glib-2.0, /usr/share/gtk-doc/html/gio, /usr/share/gtk-doc/html/glib, and /usr/share/gtk-doc/html/gobject

Short Descriptions

gapplication

can be used to start applications and can be used to send messages to already-running instances of other applications.

gdbus

is a simple tool used for working with D-Bus objects.

gdbus-codegen

is used to generate code and/or documentation for one or more D-Bus interfaces.

gio-querymodules

is used to create a giomodule.cache file in the listed directories. This file lists the implemented extension points for each module that has been found.

glib-compile-resources

is used to read the resource description from file and the files that it references to create a binary resource bundle that is suitable for use with the GResource API.

glib-compile-schemas

is used to compile all the GSettings XML schema files in directory into a binary file with the name gschemas.compiled that can be used by GSettings.

glib-genmarshal

is a C code marshaller generation utility for GLib closures.

glib-gettextize

is a variant of the gettext internationalization utility.

glib-mkenums

is a C language enum description generation utility.

gobject-query

is a small utility that draws a tree of types.

gresource

offers a simple commandline interface to GResource.

gsettings

offers a simple commandline interface to GSettings.

gtester

is a test running utility.

gtester-report

is a test report formatting utility.

GLib libraries

contain a low-level core libraries for the GIMP Toolkit.

Last updated on 2015-02-20 16:04:13 -0800