Build instructions for GLib

The OVITO Python module for Linux includes a binary version of the GLib library licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv2.1 or later). In accordance with the requirements of this license, this page provides instructions on how to rebuild a compatible version of the library from source code.

The library is not part of the OVITO Pro or OVITO Basic program packages. Those ship a Qt framework that OVITO builds itself with GLib support switched off. The ovito package installed from PyPI takes its Qt libraries from the PySide6 package instead, and those are built with GLib support enabled, which is why the two files libglib-2.0.so.0 and libgthread-2.0.so.0 are shipped alongside it in the ovito/plugins/syslibs/ directory of the installed package.

Linux

The OVITO Python module includes shared libraries that have been built from the unmodified sources of GLib 2.88.3. The following commands were used to build them:

tar xJf glib-2.88.3.tar.xz
cd glib-2.88.3
meson setup build \
    --prefix=/usr/local \
    --libdir=lib \
    --buildtype=release \
    --wrap-mode=nofallback \
    --force-fallback-for=pcre2 \
    -Dlibmount=disabled \
    -Dselinux=disabled \
    -Dsysprof=disabled \
    -Dman-pages=disabled \
    -Ddocumentation=false \
    -Dtests=false \
    -Dglib_debug=disabled \
    -Dintrospection=disabled
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

--force-fallback-for=pcre2 makes the build compile PCRE2 10.46 as a subproject and link it into libglib-2.0.so.0 statically, because the build container provides an older PCRE2 than GLib requires. PCRE2 is distributed under the BSD-3-Clause license; its sources are available at https://github.com/PCRE2Project/pcre2.