[tlbuild] TeX Live builds -- second summary

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Mon, 4 May 2009, Karl Berry wrote:

>    That should be easy provided there is a libfontconfig.la
>
> There is no file named libfontconfig.la on my systems, eg, where I make
> the i386-linux binaries.  So that's not going to work.

Hi Karl,

so you are using a distro that thinks they can discard the .la files. Shame
on them, you really should complain loudly.

>    I'd love to check that the installed freetype headers come from the
>    same version as those in the TL tree, i.e., currently 2.3.9 but at
>    the moment don't see how to do that (other that compiling a small
>    test program checking just this).
>
> We must not force a particular version of zlib|freetype|expat on the
> build system.  I couldn't build the i386-linux binaries if we did.

Then we have a problem -- unless we do two separate builds, one for xetex
and one for everything else.

Whereas libfontconfig.la (or for linux -lfontconfig) gives us all
information about the required libraries, I don't see how the get the
'-I's required for the system ft2. Unsing ft2 headers from the TL tree
together with in install library may cause all sorts of subtle problems. On
the other hand the headers on the build system and the shared library on the
target system may equally be from different versions. What a mess.

> FWIW, the i386-linux/xetex binary in TL 2008 dynamically links with
> expat (.so.0), freetype (.6), and fontconfig (.1), but not libz for some
> reason.  I don't know how this came about, but the result works.
>
> I seem to recall that we tried to eliminate the freetype dynamic link too,
> but that caused problems because different versions of fontconfig really
> did need their respective versions of freetype.  There were no such
> problems with libz.
>
> If a particular xetex binary uses a dynamically-linked libz, it's
> certainly no disaster since we're already linking against so much else.

On my linux system libfontconfig.so certainly pulls in libz.so, in addition
to the libz.a from the TL tree. That's no problem for linux (contrary to
Cygwin).

Regards
Peter