Xorg-7.2 libXfont

[Randy McMurchy]

This isn't an actual issue. I had problems compiling the bdftopcf program in XorgApps because what turns out to be an issue with libXfont. On Christmas Day last year, DJ removed parts of the Wiki that deals with the exact issue I see.

* NOTE: the system having this issue does not have BLFS-SVN packages installed, nor is it even close to an LFS-6.2 system. It is a recently built system using LFS SVN and many updated BLFS packages including FreeType and Fontconfig. *

Anyway, the relevant text removed from the Wiki is this: ​http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/Xorg7Libraries?action=diff&version=8

My Questions:

1. I'm wondering what is the root reason why this issue exists?

(package versions probably?) I did not try to search the mail archives for this issue.

2. Why was that text removed from the Wiki? If it wasn't

relevant to current BLFS-6.2, then we probably should leave stuff like that, but add a description or something that it only happens in XYZ configuration (or whatever).

3. We should use the comment facility when changes such as this

are made to the Wiki so that you don't have to search mail archives or something else to find out why the change was made.

Please don't hesitate to close this ticket. I marked it for 6.3 simply so there may be a reply and it stays in queue.

[dnicholson@…]

I don't know the entire history here, but I think the problem is that there is a freetype macro ft_isdigit that's included in one of the freetype headers. The problem is "fixed" in libXfont-1.3.1 because the code which used ft_isdigit was removed. But this definitely should work with libXfont-1.2.8 and bdftopcf-1.0.1. Looking at bdftopcf, though, I'm not really sure how it manifested this issue, though.

Any chance you can show the error building bdftocpf and let me know what versions of libXfont, freetype and bdftopcf were in use? I'm guessing that we might just need to kludge in an #include in libXfont to ensure this always works.

[Randy McMurchy]

I'm now past this issue, and cannot exactly reproduce it as I've since updated the version of libXfont to 1.3.0 and it seems to work fine (I've not tested the X installation yet, I'm still building packages).

I can say that it was the ft_isdigit issue exactly as described in the Wiki page I mentioned. Here are the specifics when the issue occurred:

x86-64 building in 32bit mode Very current LFS-SVN Linux-2.6.24.4 FreeType-2.3.5 Fontconfig-2.5.0 Xorg-7.2 packages using BLFS-SVN wget file

I updated libXfont to 1.3.0 and the issue went away. Let me know if you want more info. One of the reasons I built Xorg-7.2 instead of 7.3 was to see how it would build in an imaginary scenario where you used LFS-SVN and some minor updated BLFS packages, but stuck with the Xorg-7.2 instructions as they stand right now (which is probably close to how they will be in the 6.3 release).

[Randy McMurchy]

Updated the description to change very relevant material