Bug#896684: fontconfig-config errors: Maybe tightening the dependencies is an option?

[Laurent Bigonville]

On Thu, 19 Jul 2018 08:39:02 +0200 Thomas Viehmann <tv at beamnet.de> wrote:
 > Hi,
 >
 > So the original report experienced this - like me - with emacs.
 > I could also produce it with just running fc-cache.
 >
 > Damien's hint is spot-on, thank you Damien!
 >
 > I had a 2.13 fontconfig-config but 2.12 (lib)fontconfig:
 >
 > ii fontconfig 2.12.6-0.1
 > ii fontconfig-config 2.13.0-5
 > ii libfontconfig1:amd64
 > 2.12.6-0.1 ii libfontconfig1-dev:amd64
 > 2.12.6-0.1
 >
 > After upgrading everything to 2.13.0-5, the errors are gone.
 >
 > Would it be an option to require the same (upstream?) version in the
 > dependency on fontconfig on fontconfig-config. Clearly fontconfig may
 > break if it get's a too new fontconfig-config.

For what I see, libfontconfig1 package has a dependency against 
fontconfig-config (>= ${source:Version})

Note that the relation is >= and not =

Looking at the git history, I can see the following commit:

commit 7278b583d2ec28786ae75d1917a5eab98c63fbf9
Author: Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com>
Date:   Sun Feb 23 14:29:53 2014 -0800

     Relax libfontconfig1 dependency on fontconfig-config to >=
     
     This will allow building the package on other architectures where
     the build dependencies require that fontconfig be installed in order
     to build fontconfig.
     
     Signed-off-by: Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com>

We could make the dependency more strict again, but that cause issues to 
build the package.

For what I can see, the circular dependency is caused by 
texlive-binaries (used for the documentation generation) that pulls 
libfontconfig1. That could be a good example for using the nodoc build 
profile

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