[tex-live] dvisvgm can't find libgs

[Karl Berry]

Hi Bob,

    I'd like to pick up this thread from November of 2012. 

(For the record: starting at
http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2012-November/032632.html)

    distributions only provide a libgs.so link in their libgs-dev or
    ghostscript-development packages. Is there a good reason for this?

I am not sure what you're asking, probably because I didn't reread all
those messages.  Sorry.

However, I can tell you that the libgs dynamic linkage from dvisvgm
defeated me this year.  Just running `dvisvgm -Vyes' crashed after
compiling it on my CentOS 5 machine, because the runtime loading of
libgs ends up pulling the system (older) version of libstdc++, which
conflicts with the current version of libstdc++ that I use to compile
the program (because it won't compile with the older g++).

I talked extensively with Martin and Peter about it, and the only
feasible solution we could find was to disable even looking for libgs,
so that's what we did.  As far as I know, this was only needed for my
build on i386-linux.

(Statically compiling with libgs didn't work either, although I can't
remember now exactly how it failed.  Not going back there ...)

sigh,
karl