I'm trying to compile GNOME 2 from sources, partly because I wanted a challenge and partly because the dropline GNOME binary distribution for Slackware sucked and I've run across a problem with the sawfish window manager, specifically it won't build the theme engine because it can't find rep-gtks libglade and gnome wrappers. rep-gtk is version 0.17 and was configured with the --with-libglade and --with-gnome options so as far as I can tell the wrappers were built but the sawfish (1.2a-gtk2 and 2.0, both had the same problem) configure script isn't picking them up. Anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Do you have GNOME in PATH and LIBRARY_PATH (usually: /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib)?

I assume so, I compiled pretty much everything without specifying prefix parameters so it's all in the default locations which I assume are covered by the relevant environment variables.

I think I've found something: I was poking around in the config.log file to see if I could gain any insight into what was happening when it was performing the rep-gtk check and discovered it was looking for the wrappers in gui/gtk/ when in actual fact mine are installed in to /gui/gtk-2 (with a prefix of /usr/local/libexec/rep/i686-pc-linux-gnu/). I tried both symlinking gtk-2 to gtk and modifying the configure script itself but neither worked, instead now I have *** Error: /usr/local/libexec/rep/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gui/gtk/libglade.so: undefined symbol: sgtk_callbak_destroy in config.log. What does this mean? Should I recompile GTK+ 2 (version 2.2.0) and then try again (after in turn recompiling librep and rep-gtk)?

This is with sawfish-1.2-gtk2 btw, I gave up on sawfish 2.0 after reading that this version was more recent.

'Error: /usr/local/libexec/rep/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gui/gtk/libglade.so: undefined symbol: sgtk_callbak_destroy' means that libglade library can't find one of the functions it needs. Try
ldd /usr/local/libexec/rep/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gui/gtk/libglade.so
Look if all the listed libraries are available.

Yep, thats exactly what it was. On a hunch I went trawling through the LFS mailing list archives (I figured that if anyone else would know about this and how to fix it it'd be an LFS'er) and came across this:

http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/...2/08/0170.html

It would seem that not only do you need gtk2/libglade2 wrappers (rep-gtk 0.17) but gtk1/libglade1 wrappers as well (rep-gtk 0.15). After following the procedure in that post I managed to get the configure script to successfully complete, themer support included but now I have another problem: After a while the compile with terminate with these messages:

gtk-style.c: In function `print_rc_style':
gtk-style.c:101: structure has no member named `font_name'
gtk-style.c:102: structure has no member named `font_name'
gtk-style.c:103: structure has no member named `fontset_name'
gtk-style.c:104: structure has no member named `fontset_name'
make[1]: *** [gtk-style] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/sawfish-1.2-gtk2/src'
make: *** [all] Error 1

I tried uninstalling GTK1 and 2 in turn but all that accomplished was causing the configure script to start failing again. I have a strong feeling it's caused by the presence of a conflicting set of libraries as I've seen similar errors before but I can't be certain. Any one have any ideas as to what might be causing this?

I've got GNOME2 compiled from source (some time ago) and I've got rep-gtk version 0.15 only. Maybe try to uninstall the 0.17 version (only make uninstall, without deleting it, because you may have dependencies problems).

What version of sawfish were you using then? Sawfish 1.2 requires rep-gtk 0.17, the configure script won't even complete without it. libglade1/rep-gtk 0.15 are required to set up the gtk-1 bindings needed to get the themer to be included by the configure script. I probably did have something in the way though. I was (an unfortunate accident, caused by stupidity on my part, caused that install to get hosed resulting in the need to rebuild it from scratch) installing, uninstalling and symlinking stuff all over the place in an effort to get this working and probably forgot to remove some of them. Now I know the correct procedure, I'll try it again later and see what happens.

I downloaded and compied the source more than 4 months ago, and I can't check it now (it's on the other machine).
Try again. GNOME compilation is much harder than KDE, so don't worry, just try.

I've figured it out: I was using GTK 2.2.0. Now thats OK except for the fact that Sawfish does a check to see if the version of GTK you're using contains those two functions in the error. These were present in 1.2 but removed in 1.3 and later releases. It performs this check by looking for the minor version of GTK on your system. If this is 2 it will include the two functions. Of course, have version 2.2 validates the check and the functions are included even though they aren't actually present. Temporarily building a 2.0.x GTK and then building sawfish solved the problem (and afterwards GTK 2.2.0 was restored).