Dependencies

Before you can compile the GTK widget toolkit, you need to have various other tools and libraries installed on your system. Dependencies of GTK have their own build systems, so you will need to refer to their own installation instructions.

A particular important tool used by GTK to find its dependencies is pkg-config.

pkg-config is a tool for tracking the compilation flags needed for libraries that are used by the GTK libraries. (For each library, a small .pc text file is installed in a standard location that contains the compilation flags needed for that library along with version number information.)

Some of the libraries that GTK depends on are maintained by the GTK team: GLib, GdkPixbuf, Pango, and GObject Introspection. Other libraries are maintained separately.