#14 Configuring/compiling fails with GTK 2.0

[Klaus-Peter Arendt]

I tried to compile surf 1.0.6 on Ubuntu Karmic.
The install notes for surf talk about requiring to use GTK 1.2 or later.
GTK 2.0 / dev is installed.
The configure script warns with
checking for GTK - version >= 1.2.0... no
*** The gtk-config script installed by GTK could not be found
...
*** set the GTK_CONFIG environment variable to the full path to gtk-config
But it seems, that GTK 2.0 does not offer a gtk-config script anymore
GTK 1.2 can not be simply installed side by side with GTK 2.0 from the repositories,
because the ubuntu team does highly recommend not to use GTK 1.2 anymore

Subsequently make fails with "No rule to make target gtkgui/start.o" (related to the configure error?)

Thanks a lot!

[Daniel Macks]

gtk2 isn't just a slightly newer/next release of the same gtk, but is a massively changed programming interface that even uses an entirely different way of publishing/detecting compiler flags. gtk2 started replacing gtk1 many years ago, and many distros no longer support the (or sometimes even distribute?) that dusty&crusty old one. Heck, gtk3 is coming in a few months! Would be great to have surf updated to gtk2. "Sometimes" that change is easy, sometimes requires deep hacking:(

[Daniel Macks]

I took a whack at migrating...got it to compile by changing to the new (pkgconfig) flag detection and setting some flags to enable deprecated function usage. Bus error when I tried to run the examples/ scripts. I give up on that.

My vendor has a package for "surfer", which is written for gtk2. Its homepage <http://www.imaginary2008.de/surfer.php> states: "Surfer is a program to visualize real algebraic geometry in real-time. The surfaces visualized are given by the zero set of a polynomial equation in 3 variables. Surfer is based on the program Surf".