XFCE 4.8 on Debian lenny: dependency hell

edmund · 2011-02-04 12:24:47

I am trying to build XFCE 4.8 on Debian lenny, following the build instructions at http://www.xfce.org/download/building. It appears that these instructions use rather loose names for the prerequisite packages. So far I have encountered and believe I have solved the following oddities:
- package libxfce4util requires "gobject", which appears to be provided by libglib2.0-dev
- package xfconf requires "dbus-1", which appears to be provided by libdbus-1-dev
- package xfconf requires "dbus-glib-1", which appears to be provided by libdbus-glib-1-dev
- package xfconf requires "Extutils:depends", which appears to be provided by libextutils-depends-perl
- package xfconf requires "Extutils:pkgconfig", which appears to be provided by libextutils-pkgconfig-perl

I have now hit a brick wall with package libxfce4ui. The error message from configure/make is "configure: error: X Window system libraries and header files are required". I have tried installing xserver-xorg-dev, but the error message is still there.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

As an aside, I would make the following suggestions for the whole install procedure:
- provide a tar file for download that does not contain other tar files, but rather contains the whole directory structure in a form that can be obtained with a single tar x operation
- provide a preinstall script that checks whether all dependencies are in place, and outputs a list of those that are not (as mentioned, the existing build instructions use loose names, they also present the dependencies in a structure completely unsuited to quickly getting all missing ones, and they themselves seem to be missing some packages)
- provide a wrapper script that will build each component in turn, in the correct order, so that a single command will build the entire XFCE installation
- reduce (to almost zero) the number of informational messages that come out of configure/make: it is surely only error messages that we need to see?
With all this, it may take one less than the three hours that I have needed to get to this point.

Nick · 2011-02-10 10:42:53

You probably miss the libx11 devel package.

For the tars in the tar: there is a bug about that, it is indeed inconvenient, we're working on it.

We're not going to provide build scripts. There are too many distros and operating systems out there and it will for sure not work with all of them. That said, it is always recommended to use the packages of your distro. There is an installer for 4.8 (http://foo-projects.org/~nick/installers/), but it is not widely tested, so feel free to let me know you experience.

The make and configure output can be reduced, there are command line options for that (probably ./configure --quiet). Anyway, other people like to see what's being done, so not up to use what's outputted or not.

edmund · 2011-02-14 03:22:42

Thanks for your advice, which was correct: I needed the Debian package libx11-dev.

I might just as well document the other Debian packages I have needed subsequently, for the benefit of others:
- package libxfce4ui also requires libgtk2.0-dev
- package libxfcegui4 requires requires libglade2-dev
- package libxfce4menu does not exist in the release, even though it is referred to in the build instructions
- package garcon does not exist in the release, even though it is referred to in the build instructions

...and that last one is a showstopper, since garcon is a prerequisite for other XFCE packages. I raised bug 7283 for this, against the web site build instructions. Presumably it needs to be reassigned as a bug in the release.

Nick · 2011-02-15 15:39:04

Garcon is independent from the other packages to be more cross-platform, but you can find it here: http://archive.xfce.org/src/libs/garcon/

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#1 2011-02-04 12:24:47

XFCE 4.8 on Debian lenny: dependency hell

#2 2011-02-10 10:42:53

Re: XFCE 4.8 on Debian lenny: dependency hell

#3 2011-02-14 03:22:42

Re: XFCE 4.8 on Debian lenny: dependency hell

#4 2011-02-15 15:39:04

Re: XFCE 4.8 on Debian lenny: dependency hell

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