Here are some tips that helped me to compile gedit on ubuntu 12.10 64 bit.
I wanted to use jhbuild that allows to compile gnome related software (among others) in separate folders than system ones.
First I read this manual and executed the suggested operations:
http://developer.gnome.org/jhbuild/stable/getting-started.html.en
Then I tried to compile gedit with the command
jhbuild buildone gedit
but configure complained that these packets were not been installed:
No package 'libxml-2.0' found
No package 'glib-2.0' found
No package 'gio-2.0' found
No package 'gtk+-3.0' found
No package 'gtksourceview-3.0' found
actually they were already installed but jhedit couldn't find them because I didn't set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.
In the PKG_CONFIG_PATH I set the paths where are installed the libraries searched by jhbuild.
To know the name of the package to install or, if it is already installed, to know the path to add to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable you can run the command
apt-file search missingfilename.pc
where missingfilename comes from the configure message error. As an example:
apt-file search gtksourceview-3.0.pc returns
libgtksourceview-3.0-dev: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/gtksourceview-3.0.pc
which means that the package that must be present is libgtksourceview-3.0-dev and that, actually, it is already installed at the path /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/.
At the end I had to set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable in the following way:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/:/usr/lib/pkgconfig/:/usr/share/pkgconfig/
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
After this I was able to run without errors the command jhbuild buildone gedit.
To run the gedit just compiled from the repository instead of the system one you can run:
jhbuild run gedit.
