GLib-2.78.1

Introduction to GLib

The GLib package contains 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.

[Note]

Note

Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.

Package Information

Additional Downloads

GLib Dependencies

Recommended

Optional

dbus-1.14.10 (for some tests), Fuse-3.16.2 and bindfs (both needed for one test), GDB-13.2 (for bindings), docbook-xml-4.5, docbook-xsl-nons-1.79.2, GTK-Doc-1.33.2 (to build API documentation), glib-networking-2.78.0 (for some tests, but this is a circular dependency), and sysprof

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-2.2 and desktop-file-utils-0.27, respectively. These two utilities are also needed for some tests.

Installation of GLib

If desired, apply the optional patch. In many cases, applications that use this library, either directly or indirectly via other libraries such as GTK+-3.24.38, output numerous warnings when run from the command line. This patch enables the use of an environment variable, GLIB_LOG_LEVEL, that suppresses unwanted messages. The value of the variable is a digit that corresponds to:

1 Alert
2 Critical
3 Error
4 Warning
5 Notice

For instance export GLIB_LOG_LEVEL=4 will skip output of Warning and Notice messages (and Info/Debug messages if they are turned on). If GLIB_LOG_LEVEL is not defined, normal message output will not be affected.

patch -Np1 -i ../glib-skip_warnings-1.patch
[Warning]

Warning

If a previous version of glib is installed, move the headers out of the way so that later packages do not encounter conflicts:

if [ -e /usr/include/glib-2.0 ]; then
    rm -rf /usr/include/glib-2.0.old &&
    mv -vf /usr/include/glib-2.0{,.old}
fi

Install GLib by running the following commands:

mkdir build &&
cd    build &&

meson setup ..            \
      --prefix=/usr       \
      --buildtype=release \
      -Dman=true          &&
ninja
[Note]

Note

If libxslt-1.1.39 is installed, the above command may indicate several (about 33) errors that start with "Error: no ID for constraint linkend:" when generating the man pages. These are harmless.

The GLib test suite requires desktop-file-utils for some tests. 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:

ninja install &&

mkdir -p /usr/share/doc/glib-2.78.1 &&
cp -r ../docs/reference/{gio,glib,gobject} /usr/share/doc/glib-2.78.1

You should now install desktop-file-utils-0.27 and shared-mime-info-2.2 and proceed to run the test suite.

[Warning]

Warning

Do not run the test suite as root or some tests will fail unexpectedly and leave some non-FHS-compliant directories in the /usr hierarchy.

To test the results, after having installed the package, issue: LC_ALL=C ninja test as a non-root user.

Command Explanations

--buildtype=release: Specify a buildtype suitable for stable releases of the package, as the default may produce unoptimized binaries.

-Dman=true: This switch causes the build to create and install the package man pages.

-Dgtk_doc=true: This switch causes the build to create and install the API documentation.

Contents

Installed Programs: gapplication, gdbus, gdbus-codegen, gio, 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/doc/{glib-2.0,glib-2.78.1}, and /usr/share/gtk-doc/html/{gio,glib,gobject} (optional)

Short Descriptions

gapplication

can be used to start applications and 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

is a utility that makes many GIO features available from the command line

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 a 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 a 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 command line interface to GResource

gsettings

offers a simple command line interface to GSettings

gtester

is a test running utility

gtester-report

is a test report formatting utility

GLib libraries

contain low-level core libraries for the GIMP Toolkit