[Geany-Users] Fwd: Re: Build on Debian Buster

[Frank Lanitz]

On 14.12.20 20:30, Lex Trotman wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Dec 2020 at 23:47, ken at shail.co.uk <ken at shail.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> I have now managed to get 1.37 to compile and install.
>>
>> Yesterday
>> I had a configure message about missing gtk+-3.0 but could not find that in apt-cache.
>> I had therefore set  GTK_FLAGS and GTK_LIBS as suggested on the assumption that it would work-around that error.
>> It obviously did not.
> 
> Distro package names vary between distros (and sometimes versions),
> for example the Ubuntu 20.04 development package (the one you want) is
> called libgtk-3-dev but on Fedora its gtk3-devel (IIUC).  But the
> `pkg-config` package provided is still called gtk+-3.0 which (IIUC) is
> what configure is testing. There is no real way configure can know the
> distro package names AFAIK.

And on NixOS e.g. it's a complete different way on even installing it.

I think this is more an matter of education of users -- what are the 
differences between runtime and compile time dependencies and why not 
everything is packed up together in one package (which actually was long 
time ago and e.g. other systems like Gentoo you still have due to the 
different way of packaging.) If nobody tells the user, he cannot know. 
(So no offense to the users). This is also an issue on systems like 
snap/docker/* I see, which are actually hiding this stuff to the user on 
purpose. (Also no offense to the user, who just want to use it and don't 
want to write an thesis about how to install ;))


Cheers,
Frank