[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#555596: Bug#555596: [Fontforge-devel] mensis: FTBFS with binutils-gold

Rogério Brito rbrito at ime.usp.br
Sat Apr 24 20:13:48 UTC 2010


Hi, Kęstutis and others,

On Apr 24 2010, George Williams wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 04:59, Kęstutis Bilūnas wrote:
> > How to do explicitly link against libfreetype6 (or maybe
> > libfontconfig1) library? I've been unable to do so correctly.
>
> Well, you are trying to build mensis in a way which isn't really
> supported. It expects to dlopen freetype rather than link with it, and
> that's all the Makefile/configure script was written to handle.

Just to keep this in the archives (which is what George tried to tell),
this is the intended behavior, and (actually) a design decision that he
used with his programs.

The dlopen thing is a way to load shared libraries during runtime, if
they are available, intead of creating a hard-dependency on those
libraries.

It can be seen as a "plugin-like" system, if you so prefer. All that
this means is that we actually may have symbols in the binaries that
never get to be bound to the libraries, if such libraries are not
present at runtime.

With operating systems distributed like Debian, Redhat etc, the
maintainers usually set the dependencies of the binary packages at build
time and, in essence, this problem would not be present in a regular
installation of the tools.

OTOH, it also means that we can, in some cases, just demote the Depends:
to a Recommends: and things "should work".

http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/faq.html#dynamic-libs

You can also see my comments here:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=578634



Regards, Rogério Brito.

P.S.: George, did you happen to get my other e-mail? I may be having
some e-mail problems... :-(

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
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