[metapost] Trying to figure out MPLib

[Shriramana Sharma]

On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 at 6:45 PM, Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> wrote:
>
> If you are not using fonts nor using labels, there really are no
> dependencies to metapost, except for that silly kpathsea thing.

Hi. As I said on my offlist mail, basically what I'll be using MPLib
for is to find control points for smooth curves and possible for
finding intersection/tangent points. I will be programming using Qt
(either in C++ or Python) and that has support for the fonts/labels
stuff (which I still don't need for my particular application).

So given your patch for the kpathsea problem, does this mean that I
can execute a program linked against the libmplib.a as it is produced
by compiling the tarball on a system which does not have TeX? What
will happen if a label command is included in the command argument I
pass to mp_execute and the system doesn't have the least trace of TeX
on it?

And pardon me if I missed this somewhere, but does the source-tree as
it is distributed even have a *build*-dependency on any
TeX-components? (I have seen packages which have a build-dependency on
TeX [for documentation or such] but not for execution, which is why I
ask.) As you can see, as far as possible, I would like to not have any
dependency on TeX either for building or for execution.

Also, can you please point me to where in the source tree I should go
to make a shared library out of MPost rather than the static library
which is produced right now?

Thanks a lot for all your kind help!

-- 
Shriramana Sharma