[tlbuild] Strange build failures on Mac OS X 10.6

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hi,

On Tue, 30 Jun 2020 at 00:03, Karl Berry wrote:
>
>       "_BrotliDecoderDecompress", referenced from:
>           _sfnt_open_font in libfreetype.a(sfnt.o)
>
> My only immediate information is that I have no "brotli" system library
> on my centos7 build systems, yet of course the build works. There is no
> mention of it in the build logs. Maybe there is mac-specific code in
> libfreetype that is looking for brotli? Seems improbable.
>
> brotli is included in texk/dvisvgm, but only for dvisvgm, because as far
> as I knew nothing else needed it. Making it a TL-wide library would
> .. not be fun. I doubt it is actually needed for anything we are doing.
>
> Maybe some argument could be given to the freetype (and overall)
> configure to not look for it? --without-brotli, from a glance at
> freetype-src/builds/unix/configure ... probably won't be that easy ... -k

I had access to both machines now and compared the set of packages.
The one machine that didn't work had more packages installed,
including pkgconfig, autoconf, automake, brotli, fontconfig, freetype,
tiff, jpeg, ...

I removed all packages that weren't installed on the working machine
and now the builds pass again.

I suspect that having freetype & pkgconfig installed broke the build
as TeX Live tried to potentially access headers from the system
freetype at some point (as suggested by pkg-config), but later failed
as these function calls were missing from the internal libraries that
TeX Live eventually tried to link against. If this is true, it means
that there's probably room for improvement of the configure scripts,
but none of that is trivial, in particular because we often use them
unmodified from upstream.

Mojca