gtk3/docs/reference/gtk/building.sgml
2022-12-08 17:58:29 +00:00

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<refentry id="gtk-building">
<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 with GTK+ much faster than building it yourself. In
fact, you may well already have GTK+ installed on your system
already.
</para>
<para>
On all supported platforms, GTK+ uses the Meson build system.
</para>
<programlisting>
tar xvfJ gtk+-3.24.0.tar.xz
</programlisting>
<para>
Once you have extracted the files from the release archive, and
you entered the source directory, you can use the <command>meson</command>
command to configure the project.
</para>
<programlisting>
meson setup --prefix=/opt/gtk _builddir .
</programlisting>
<para>
A full list of options can be found by running
<command>meson configure</command> from within the build directory.
In general, the defaults are right and should be trusted.
</para>
<para>
After you've run <command>meson setup</command>, you then run the
<command>meson compile</command> command to build the project and
install it.
</para>
<programlisting>
meson compile -C _builddir
meson install -C _builddir
</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 <command>meson install</command>.
</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 files 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 main tool needed during the build process (as
differentiated from the tools used in when creating GTK+
mentioned above such as <application>meson</application>)
is <command>pkg-config</command>.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink
url="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/">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.)
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<para>
Some of the libraries that GTK+ depends on are maintained by
by the GTK+ team: GLib, GdkPixbuf, Pango, ATK and GObject Introspection.
Other libraries are maintained separately.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The <ulink url="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib">GLib library</ulink>
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 <ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/glib/">here</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <ulink url="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdk-pixbuf/">GdkPixbuf library</ulink>
provides facilities for loading images in a variety of file formats.
It is available
<ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/gdk-pixbuf/">here</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango">Pango</ulink> is a library
for internationalized text handling. It is available
<ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/pango/">here</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/atk">ATK</ulink> 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
<ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/atk/">here</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection">Gobject Introspection</ulink>
is a framework for making introspection data available to
language bindings. It is available
<ulink url="https://download.gnome.org/sources/gobject-introspection/">here</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<title>External dependencies</title>
<listitem>
<para>
The <ulink url="https://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="https://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 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="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/">fontconfig</ulink>
library provides Pango with a standard way of locating
fonts and matching them against font names.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="https://www.cairographics.org">Cairo</ulink>
is a graphics library that supports vector graphics and image
compositing. Both Pango and GTK+ use cairo for all of their
drawing.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<ulink url="https://github.com/anholt/libepoxy">libepoxy</ulink>
is a library that abstracts the differences between different
OpenGL libraries. GTK+ uses it for cross-platform GL support.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <ulink url="https://wayland.freedesktop.org">Wayland</ulink> libraries
are needed to build GTK+ with the Wayland backend.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <ulink url="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/shared-mime-info">shared-mime-info</ulink>
package is not a hard dependency of GTK+, but it contains definitions
for mime types that are used by GIO and, indirectly, by GTK+.
gdk-pixbuf will use GIO for mime type detection if possible. For this
to work, shared-mime-info needs to be installed and
<envar>XDG_DATA_DIRS</envar> set accordingly at configure time.
Otherwise, gdk-pixbuf falls back to its built-in mime type detection.
</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+
applications</link>. You can test your GTK+ installation
by running the <command>gtk3-demo</command> program that
GTK+ installs.
</para>
<para>
If either the <command>meson setup</command> or the
<command>meson compile</command> commands fail, look closely
at the error messages printed; these will often provide useful
information as to what went wrong.
</para>
</refsect1>
<refsect1 id="extra-configuration-options">
<title>Extra Configuration Options</title>
<para>
In addition to the standard <command>meson</command> options
when configuring the GTK+ project, you have a number of
additional arguments. (Command line arguments for the other
libraries are described in the documentation distributed with
the those libraries.)
<cmdsynopsis>
<command>meson setup</command>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dxinerama=[yes/no/auto]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dgtk_doc=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dprint_backends=["cups,file,lpr,papi,test,auto"]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dx11_backend=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dwin32_backend=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dquartz_backend=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dbroadway_backend=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dwayland_backend=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dintrospection=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
<sbr/>
<group>
<arg choice="plain">-Dinstalled_tests=[false/true]</arg>
</group>
</cmdsynopsis>
</para>
<formalpara>
<title><systemitem>-Dxinerama</systemitem></title>
<para>
By default GTK will try to link against the Xinerama libraries
if they are found. This option can be used to explicitly control
whether Xinerama should be used.
</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara>
<title><systemitem>-Dgtk_doc</systemitem></title>
<para>
The <application>gtk-doc</application> package is
used to generate the reference documentation included
with GTK+. By default support for <application>gtk-doc</application>
is disabled because it requires various extra dependencies
to be installed. If you have
<application>gtk-doc</application> installed and
are modifying GTK+, you may want to enable
<application>gtk-doc</application> support by passing
in <systemitem>-Dgtk_doc=true</systemitem>. If not
enabled, pre-generated HTML files distributed with GTK+
will be installed.
</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara>
<title><systemitem>-Dprint_backends</systemitem></title>
<para>
By default GTK will try to build the appropriate print backend
for the system. You can specify the print backends manually to
explicitly control which backends should be build.
</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara>
<title><systemitem>-Dx11_backend</systemitem>,
<systemitem>-Dwin32_backend</systemitem>,
<systemitem>-Dquartz_backend</systemitem>,
<systemitem>-Dbroadway_backend</systemitem>,
<systemitem>-Dwayland_backend</systemitem></title>
<para>
Enable specific backends for GDK. If none of these options
are given, the x11 backend will be enabled by default,
unless the platform is Windows, in which case the default is
win32. If any backend is explicitly enabled or disabled, no
other platform will be enabled automatically. Other
supported backends are the quartz backend for macOS, and the
HTML-based Broadway backend.
</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara>
<title><systemitem>-Dintrospection</systemitem></title>
<para>
Build with or without introspection support.
The default is 'true'.
</para>
</formalpara>
<formalpara>
<title><systemitem>-Dinstalled-tests</systemitem></title>
<para>
Whether to install tests on the system. If enabled, tests
and their data are installed in <filename>${libexecdir}/gtk+/installed-tests</filename>.
Metadata for the tests is installed in <filename>${prefix}/share/installed-tests/gtk+</filename>.
To run the installed tests, <command>gnome-desktop-testing-runner</command>
can be used.
</para>
</formalpara>
</refsect1>
</refentry>
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