Compiling Software from Source, Part VII

Compiling Software from Source, Part VII

(Had a little misnumbering problem last time. Sorry about that.)

Let’s see, I was still trying to compile gnome-vfs. It occured to
me that perhaps the problem is that the libraries somehow haven’t
been properly registered with the system. The ldconfig command might be just what I need.
This command updates a database of all of the libraries on your
system, and its configuration file is /etc/ld.so.conf. I open this
file as root, and all it has in it is:

/usr/kerberos/lib
/usr/X11R6/lib
/usr/lib/sane
/usr/lib/qt-3.1/lib
/usr/lib/mysql

I don’t need to worry about everything here but, in particular, I
want to add libbonobo since I’ve installed it and gnome-vfs can’t
find it. I run the make
install for libbonobo again and notice the following in the
middle:

Libraries have been installed in:
   /usr/local/lib/bonobo/monikers

If you ever happen to want to link against installed libraries
in a given directory, LIBDIR, you must either use libtool, and
specify the full pathname of the library, or use the `-LLIBDIR'
flag during linking and do at least one of the following:
   - add LIBDIR to the `LD_LIBRARY_PATH' environment variable
     during execution
   - add LIBDIR to the `LD_RUN_PATH' environment variable
     during linking
   - use the `-Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR' linker flag
   - have your system administrator add LIBDIR to `/etc/ld.so.conf'

See any operating system documentation about shared libraries for
more information, such as the ld(1) and ld.so(8) manual pages.

Ah ha. So I add /usr/local/lib/bonobo/monikers to /etc/ld.so.conf,
save and exit the file, and run /sbin/ldconfig. Now, yet again, I try compiling
gnome-vfs, starting with ./configure.

Same problem. I get so frustrated that I enlisted my programmer
husband (wave hi to Rob) for assistance! So, it took some
thrashing around, but here’s what we had to do:

1. The old version of libbonobo was somehow in the way. We
   moved the libbonobo libraries from /usr/lib into a /usr/lib/temp
   directory to get them out of the way, and re-ran ldconfig to update it.

2. It turns out that libbonobo needed the updated bonobo-activation libraries but had used the old ones, quietly not
   telling me that I needed to update that library. So, I built
   bonobo-activation, did a make
clean in the libbonobo directory, and then rebuilt
   libbonobo.

3. Still got the same error, so I typed export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig" to
   make sure that variable was properly set.

What do you know, I got past the libbonobo problem! Perhaps future
versions of libbonobo will have smarter configuration,
compilation, and installation routines to avoid this problem from
now on.

Of course, now it wants libbz2 before I can finally compile gnome-vfs. We’ll do that one next week.

Next week: Maybe Dee-Ann will finally get gnome-vfs
compiled.