glibmm

I recently tried out glibmm, a GNOME library that I found quite useful. However, it's important to note that until the GTK+ 2.0 / GNOME 2.0 platform stabilizes, you should make an effort to separate the unstable libraries from your stable GTK+ 1.2 / GNOME 1.2/1.4 libraries.

To do this, you can install the unstable libraries into a different prefix. For example, by running: ./configure --prefix=/usr/devgnome2. But keep in mind that when using the development libraries, you will need to modify some environment variables.

One way to make this easier is to create a file (e.g. devgnome2) in your home directory that contains these commands:

export PATH="/usr/devgnome2/bin:$PATH";
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/devgnome2/lib" ;
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/devgnome2/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH" ;

You can then type # source devgnome2 to prepare your environment before building or working with the development libraries.

Depending on your setup, you may also need to edit /etc/ld.so.conf to add /usr/devgnome2/lib, and then type /sbin/ldconfig to re-process the ld.so.conf.

Overall, I found that the vicious-build-scripts module in cvs.gnome.org helped me with this process, though it can be tricky to get it to work at times. If you're willing to put in the effort, however, the benefits of using glibmm can be worth it.