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| Compiling the GLib packageCompiling the GLib Package — How to compile GLib itself | 
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.
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 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
          --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.
          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.
        
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.
      
--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.