How can I link to my own verson of GLib rather than the system installed one?

Question

I have been looking through the source of GLib and GObject and writing programs to use certain features of each. But now I'd like to debug though something in the GLib source code without installing anything on my system.

I have a built version of the source code somewhere and I'd like to use those .so files rather than the system installed ones, and I'm not sure how to link them to my test programs. I've tried just referencing the .so files for GLib and GObject on the command-line like to GCC, but trace statements that I put in are not being run, so I suspect the regular GLib libraries are still being used.

Answer 1

Set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the directory which holds the .so you want to link against, and use ldd to verify that ld is doing what you want.