[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Well that is OK in the sense that I have not installed gtk. But I do not
> want to build ethereal. Why is it necessary to have the gtk stuff for
> modifying the configure.in file?

Because once you modify the configure.in file, the configure file has to
be built from it; the configure script checks for GTK+, so it uses the
GTK+ macro for that purpose, meaning you have to have GTK+ installed
(or, at least, have its GTK+ macros installed).

If you don't want to install GTK+, either do a build on a machine that
*does* have it installed (regardless of what OS it's running), and use
the resulting configure script, or edit the configure script by hand.