Packaging libraries inside a program?

Hey all,

tl;dr - would it be possible to package up glib, gtk, and pango, for
installation somewhere with no root access?

A friend and I have written a ruby program designed for use at uni: we
have
a cascading learning scheme where knowledgeable users can help out
people
who are stuck. You can specify which topics you know about (eg, second
year
courses, python, ruby, etc), and anyone who has a question about one can
come over and talk to you when you’re in the labs.

We wrote a simple program to allow people to find Cascaders easily,
which
installs and runs nicely on the uni systems.

However, this was a cli interface, which still scares a few people. I’ve
just finished a working GUI for the program, however, it obviously
requires
ruby-gnome2, which is not installed by default on the uni lab systems.

Here’s the question:
Would it be possible to install and package the glib, gtk, and pango
sub-libraries into my program as extra libraries, so the gui can run
without
requiring root access to install it?

Any help appreciated!

many thanks,
shearn89

Yes. You can put all the libraries in a directory and then
set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to
include that directory. If you set the environment variable
before you require gtk2 you can probably even do it
all from the ruby script.

 MikeC

ah, awesome! Can i just use the libraries from my system, or do I need
to
rebuild them as a user with different permissions or something?