[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#555596: [Fontforge-devel] mensis: FTBFS with binutils-gold

[Peter Fritzsche]

On Saturday 24 April 2010 16:11:52 George Williams wrote:
> > How to do explicitly link against libfreetype6 (or maybe libfontconfig1)
> > library? I've been unable to do so correctly.
> 
> Well, you are trying to build mensis in a way which isn't really
> supported. It expects to dlopen freetype rather than link with it, and
> that's all the Makefile/configure script was written to handle.

Ok, in that situation the debian package build with the old GNU ld is broken 
and doesn't work as you designed the software. Just check out the DT_NEEDED 
section:

$ readelf -a /usr/bin/mensis|grep freetype
 0x00000001 (NEEDED)                     Shared library: [libfreetype.so.6]

This means that the linker loads libfreetype.so.6 (probably found it by using 
--as-needed implicit while searching the DT_NEEDED section of other libraries 
it uses) and will fail to load the program if libfreetype.so.6 cannot be found 
in the ld library paths by the dynamic linker. Here is for example the ouput 
when I removed libfreetype.so.6:

$ mensis 
mensis: error while loading shared libraries: libfreetype.so.6: cannot open 
shared object file: No such file or directory

Either your argument is wrong that mensis should only load libfreetype using 
dlopen or the debian package is broken and added libfreetype.so.6 by accident 
(including adding the required symbols of libfreetype to the symbols header).

Best regards,
	Peter