Compiling the GLib package3GLib LibraryCompiling the GLib PackageHow to compile GLib itselfBuilding the Library on UNIX
On UNIX, GLib uses the standard Meson build
system. The normal sequence for compiling and installing the GLib library
is thus:
meson _buildninja -C _buildninja -C _build install
On FreeBSD:
env CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include" LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib -Wl,--disable-new-dtags" meson -Dxattr=false -Dinstalled_tests=true -Diconv=external -Db_lundef=false _buildninja -C _build
The standard options provided by Meson may be
passed to the meson command. Please see the
Meson documentation or run
meson 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,
Meson, and pkg-config;
the requirements are the same when building from a Git repository clone
of GLib.
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).
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 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
option to meson. 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.
Python 3.5 or newer is required. Your system Python must
conform to PEP 394
For FreeBSD, this means that the
lang/python3 port must be installed.
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
option.
The optional SELinux support in GIO requires libselinux.
To build GLib without SELinux support, use the
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 option.
The optional support for
SystemTap
can be disabled with the
option. Additionally, you can control the location
where GLib installs the SystemTap probes, using the
option.
Extra Configuration Options
In addition to the normal options, these additional ones are supported
when configuring the GLib library:
This is a standard Meson option which
specifies how much debugging and optimization to enable. If the build
type starts with debug,
G_ENABLE_DEBUG will be defined and GLib will be built
with additional debug code enabled.
If the build type is plain, GLib will not enable any
optimization or debug options by default, and will leave it entirely to
the user to choose their options. To build with the options recommended
by GLib developers, choose release.
Normally, Meson should be able to work out
the correct thread implementation to use. This option forces POSIX
threads to be used even if the platform provides another threading API
(for example, on Windows).
Normally, GLib will be configured to use the system-supplied PCRE
library if it is suitable, falling back to an internal version
otherwise. If this option is specified, the internal version will always
be used.
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.
and
By default, GLib uses the
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 option allows
to do that.
and
By default, GLib will 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.
and
By default, GLib will 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.
and
By default, GLib will 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.
,
or
By default, GLib will 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.
and
By default, GLib will detect if DTrace support is available, and use it.
These options can be used to explicitly control whether DTrace support
is compiled into GLib.
and
This option requires DTrace support. If it is available, then
GLib will also check for the presence of SystemTap.
and
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
ninja coverage-html. The report is placed in the
meson-logs directory.
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
then the
runtime libraries are installed into /lib rather
than /usr/lib.