GLib-2.88.3

#### Beyond Linux® From Scratch (System V Edition) - Version r13.0-1374

### Chapter 9. General Libraries

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# GLib-2.88.3

## Introduction to GLib

The GLib package contains low-level libraries useful for providing data structure handling for C, portability wrappers and interfaces for runtime functionality such as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading and an object system.

### Note

This version of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable version of the System V books.

### Package Information

- Download (HTTP): https://download.gnome.org/sources/glib/2.88/glib-2.88.3.tar.xz

- Download MD5 sum: b61c04cfbf55b0d24fbe64e4ac9e9d56

- Download size: 5.6 MB

- Estimated disk space required: 430 MB (with tests and documentation)

- Estimated build time: 0.7 SBU (add 0.5 SBU for tests; both using parallelism=4)

### Additional Downloads

GObject Introspection (Recommended)

- Download: https://download.gnome.org/sources/gobject-introspection/1.86/gobject-introspection-1.86.0.tar.xz

- Download MD5 sum: fa0f2ae76868bf35ff725f940d75ec16

- Download size: 1.1 MB

Patch for Log Level Selection (Optional)

- Optional patch: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/blfs/svn/glib-skip_warnings-1.patch

### GLib Dependencies

#### Recommended

docutils-0.23, and libxslt-1.1.45

#### Optional

Cairo-1.18.4 (for some GObject Introspection tests), dbus-1.16.2 (for some tests), Fuse-3.18.2 and bindfs (both needed for one test), GDB-17.2 (for bindings), Gjs-1.88.1 (for some GObject Introspection tests), GTK-Doc-1.36.1 (for GObject Introspection documentation), docbook-xml-4.5, docbook-xsl-nons-1.79.2, Gi-DocGen-2026.1 (to build API documentation), glib-networking-2.80.1 (for some tests, but this is a circular dependency), Mako-1.4.1 and Markdown-3.10.2 (both for g-ir-doc-tool), 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-2.5.1 and desktop-file-utils-0.28, 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-3.24.52, 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

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       \
          -D introspection=disabled \
          -D glib_debug=disabled    \
          -D man-pages=enabled      \
          -D sysprof=disabled       &&
    ninja

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.

As the `root` user, install this package for the first time to allow building GObject Introspection:

    ninja install

Build GObject Introspection:

    tar xf ../../gobject-introspection-1.86.0.tar.xz &&

    meson setup gobject-introspection-1.86.0 gi-build \
                --prefix=/usr --buildtype=release     &&
    ninja -C gi-build

To test the results of GObject Introspection, issue: ninja -C gi-build test.

As the `root` user, install GObject Introspection for generating the introspection data of GLib libraries (required by various packages using Glib, especially some GNOME packages):

    ninja -C gi-build install

Now generate the introspection data:

    meson configure -D introspection=enabled &&
    ninja

If you have Gi-DocGen-2026.1 installed and wish to build the API documentation for this package, issue:

    sed "/docs_dir =/s|$| / 'glib-' + meson.project_version()|" \
        -i ../docs/reference/meson.build                        &&
    meson configure -D documentation=true                       &&
    ninja

### 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.

### Note

If the GLIB_LOG_LEVEL environment variable is set, unset it before running the tests. Also one file that was created in the first install instruction above needs to be writable. As the `root` user, run `chmod a+rw .ninja_log`.

To test the results, issue: LC_ALL=C ninja test as a non-`root` user.

As the `root` user, install this package again for the introspection data (and optionally, the documentation):

    ninja install

## Command Explanations

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

`-D man-pages=enabled`: This switch causes the build to create and install the package man pages.

`-D glib_debug=disabled`: This switch causes the build to not include some expensive checks for debugging in the built programs and libraries.

`-D sysprof=disabled`: This switch disables the tracing support for sysprof. Remove this option if you want the tracing support. Note that if sysprof is not installed, removing this option will cause the build system to download a copy of sysprof from the Internet.

## Contents

### GLib Contents

Installed Programs: gapplication, gdbus, gdbus-codegen, gi-compile-repository, gi-decompile-typelib, gi-inspect-typelib 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, libgirepository-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, and /usr/share/doc/glib-2.88.3 (optional)

### GObject Introspection Contents

Installed Program: g-ir-annotation-tool, g-ir-compiler, g-ir-doc-tool (optional), g-ir-generate, g-ir-inspect, and g-ir-scanner
Installed Libraries: libgirepository-1.0.so and _giscanner.cpython-314-<arch>-linux-gnu.so
Installed Directories: /usr/include/gobject-introspection-1.0, /usr/lib/girepository-1.0, /usr/lib/gobject-introspection, /usr/share/gir-1.0, and /usr/share/gobject-introspection-1.0

### 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
gi-compile-repository | converts one or more GIR files into one or more typelib files
gi-decompile-typelib | is a GIR decompiler that uses the repository API
gi-inspect-typelib | is a utility that gives information about a GI typelib
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
`libgio-2.0.so` | is a library providing useful classes for general purpose I/O, networking, IPC, settings, and other high level application functionality
`libgirepository-2.0.so` | is a library providing access to typelibs and introspection data which describes C APIs
`libglib-2.0.so` | is a general-purpose, portable utility library, which provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions, string utilities, file utilities, a mainloop abstraction, and so on
`libgmodule-2.0.so` | provides portable API for dynamically loading modules
`libgobject-2.0.so` | provides the GLib base type system and object class
`libgthread-2.0.so` | is a skeleton library for backwards compatibility; it used to be the GLib thread library but the functionalities has been merged info `libglib-2.0`
g-ir-annotation-tool | creates or extracts annotation data from GI typelibs
g-ir-compiler | is a counterpart of gi-compile-repository for the old `libgirepository-1.0` API
g-ir-doc-tool | generates Mallard files that can be viewed with yelp or rendered to HTML with yelp-build from yelp-tools
g-ir-inspect | is a counterpart of gi-inspect-typelib for the old `libgirepository-1.0` API
g-ir-generate | is a counterpart of gi-decompile-typelib for the old `libgirepository-1.0` API
g-ir-scanner | is a tool which generates GIR XML files by parsing headers and introspecting GObject based libraries
`libgirepository-1.0.so` | is a counterpart of `libgirepository-2.0` with the old 1.0 API

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