Help compiling GTK4

Platform
1

I’ve followed the instructions in https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/unstable/gtk-building.html.

In my case it was:

meson setup --prefix /home/carlos/Desktop/gtk4 build

After than, when running ninja, I got:

Couldn't find include 'GdkPixbuf-2.0.gir' (search path: '['/home/carlos/Desktop/gtk/build/gtk', '/usr/share/gir-1.0', '/home/carlos/Desktop/gtk/build/gtk', '/usr/share', '/usr/share/ubuntu/gir-1.0', '/usr/local/share/gir-1.0', '/usr/share/gir-1.0', '/var/lib/snapd/desktop/gir-1.0', '/usr/share/gir-1.0', '/usr/share/gir-1.0']')

But the gir was indeed created inside the gdk-pixbuf subproject:

carlos@carlos:~/Desktop/gtk/build$ find ../ -name GdkPixbuf-2.0.gir
../build/subprojects/gdk-pixbuf/gdk-pixbuf/GdkPixbuf-2.0.gir

which is not in the search path listed in the error above.

Am I doing something wrong?

2

If you don’t need introspection data, you may want to use:

meson setup --prefix ~/Desktop/gtk4 -Dintrospection=disabled _build .

to set up the build.

Alternatively, you can install the development package for gdk-pixbuf that comes with your distribution; GTK does not require a bleeding edge version of gdk-pixbuf, and the subproject is mostly there for building GTK on macOS and Windows.

3

Alternatively, you can install the development package for gdk-pixbuf that comes with your distribution

Thanks! For pixbuf that did the trick, but unfortunately for pango the version provided by my system was too old for the build requirements. I think I don’t want to disable introspection altogether because I’m going to use this from python. What would be the best way to proceed given that I already have the pango submodule?

4

There are still some issues in the interaction between introspection and subprojects.

The easiest route may be to just build the gtk dependencies independently, and install them (with introspection enabled).

5

I think this is an issue between gobject-introspection and Meson, when using subprojects.

A solution that does not involve disabling introspection is to use jhbuild. That will install all the dependencies in a separate prefix and avoid subprojects altogether.

6

Ok, I managed to build gtk4 in two different ways according to your suggestions:

  1. First build pango and graphene from the subprojects directory and add them to PKG_CONFIG_PATH and XDG_DATA_DIRS, then build gtk4 itself.

  2. Use jhbuild. This tool is very convenient! It’s the first time I use it. The complexity of the build was quite impressive, even gstreamer bad plugins were built. I set shallow_clone = True in jhbuildrc to avoid huge clones. I had to manually install libudev-dev because it wasn’t automatically installed. Other than that, everything went ok.

After the build I set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and XDG_DATA_DIRS:

XDG_DATA_DIRS+=:/home/carlos/jhbuild/install/share
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/carlos/jhbuild/install/lib

but when I run this minimal python snippet:

import gi

gi.require_version("Gtk", "4.0")
from gi.repository import Gtk

I get:

  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/importer.py", line 145, in load_module
    dynamic_module = load_overrides(introspection_module)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/overrides/__init__.py", line 118, in load_overrides
    override_mod = importlib.import_module(override_package_name)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.8/importlib/__init__.py", line 127, in import_module
    return _bootstrap._gcd_import(name[level:], package, level)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/overrides/Gtk.py", line 168, in <module>
    class Container(Gtk.Container, Widget):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gi/module.py", line 123, in __getattr__
    raise AttributeError("%r object has no attribute %r" % (
AttributeError: 'gi.repository.Gtk' object has no attribute 'Container'

GIR files seem to be correctly generated at /home/carlos/jhbuild/install/share/gir-1.0/. I also tried putting ~/jhbuild/install/share at the beginning of XDG_DATA_DIRS, to no avail.

Do you have any idea about what may be happening? Do I need an updated version of python gi ? There are some python modules in ~/jhbuild/install/lib/python3.8/site-packages but gi is not one of them.

7

Yes, you need to build pygobject from the main development branch.

8

Ok, that did it, thanks! I had to first install pycairo in the venv in order to build and install pyobject, I think build_ext required it, is that normal?

9

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