[Scribus] Scribus 1.2.1 crashes : Solved (?)

[Martin Costabel]

Martin Costabel wrote:
[]
> Sorry for the inconvenience; stay tuned (or better, tell me why it 
> crashes :-) ).

I have just checked in the Fink package scribus-1.2.1-2 which hopefully 
doesn't crash any more (at least not at the same point :-) ). Actually 
the scribus package is not changed, except that it requires an updated 
freetype2 package.

So the real update to do is a rebuild of freetype2-[hinting]-shlibs to 
version 2.1.3-22 (which is automatic if you update scribus).

Explanation for the experts (as far as I understand this at all):

The problem was not with specific versions of freetype, but with the way 
they were compiled, actually with the version of libtool used by 
freetype. It concerns a more esoteric feature of darwin, namely the way 
how it lets you have different versions of a dynamic library coexist. 
For this to work, the libraries have to be built as "twolevel_namespace 
images" which is the default for freetype2-2.1.9, but not for earlier 
versions.

In fact, the peculiar feature of scribus that leads to this problem is 
that it does not work with freetype-2.1.0 which is installed by Apple's 
X11. Therefore one has to have a more recent version of freetype to link 
scribus against, in our case 2.1.3. But scribus links against other 
libraries that in turn pull in the libfreetype from X11, so one ends up 
with two different copies of libfreetype loaded into memory. Now if both 
libraries are compiled as twolevel_namespace images, this can work out, 
but if one of them is a flat_namespace image, as was the case for 
freetype2-2.1.3-21, then it may happen that during program execution, a 
function from one version of libfreetype suddenly continues in the other 
version of libfreetype and this gives the crash. This happened always 
when the first Type1 font was loaded, so it didn't happen if the 
document didn't use Type1 fonts.

Ralf, please let us know if this solves the problem for you.

-- 
Martin


-- 
Martin