[Scribus] Scribus 1.2.1 crashes : Solved (?)

[Martin Costabel]

Craig Bradney wrote:
[]
> What is the progress of the later versions of FT?
> And also fontconfig? I think with 1.3.x we will leave behind the X11 
> dependency as we will more than likely move to using fontconfig for font 
> discovery (fontconfig support is already in 1.3.0cvs).

There is an eternal discussion about a basic problem with Fink and other 
similar enterprises which are not complete OS distributions but only 
add-ons to an already rather complete OS, namely how far we want to stay 
with versions provided by the system or replace them by newer versions.

I am normally in favor of using as much as possible the OS-provided 
versions and use our own more recent versions only if absolutely 
necessary. In the case of freetype2, we actually at one moment decided 
to hide the Fink freetype so that programs would by default link against 
the version from Apple's X11. We even wanted to eliminate the Fink 
freetype2 package.

Scribus was one of the reasons that forced us to keep our own freetype2 
package. Another reason is that newer versions of X11 have newer 
versions of freetype, the X11 from x.org has freetype-2.1.8 if I am not 
mistaken. And unfortunately, the freetype developers haven't heard about 
the virtues of backward compatibility. They keep changing the API in 
arbitrary ways, by removing or adding underscores inside variable names, 
or by making the standard entry header <freetype/freetype.h> fail with 
an error. Therefore updating to freetype-2.1.9 for example, is not 
completely obvious. The Fink packages are ready, but it turns out that 
quite a few other packages break with this. Mozilla, for one, does not 
build against freetype above 2.1.7, xpdf is another example, and there 
are probably many others (no problem with scribus, though).

For fontconfig there is probably a similar story (I haven't had to fight 
with this yet, so I don't really know). In any case, there is a 
fontconfig-1.0.1 in Apple's X11, a version 2.2.2 in x.org's X11, and 
Fink has a static fontconfig library of version 2.2.0 (needed for gimp). 
Actually, static linking might be a possible solution for some of these 
problems.

-- 
Martin