Re: libfreetype linkage with libz. Correct behavior?

[Matthieu Herrb <matthieu.herrb@xxxxxxx>]

Edd Barrett wrote:
> Hi,
>
> You may have seen me post on misc@ regarding a library linkage problem:
> http://www.nabble.com/Odd-linking-message-(please-relink-your-binary)-td18695435.html
>
> Jonathan Kew has been working with me on this and we are wondering why
> libfreetype does not reference libz. This was the reason the XeTeX build
> was not behaving as expected for us. The machine in question here is
> OpenBSD-4.3-stable i386.
>
> Jonathan provides below a test case. Is this the behavior you guys would
> expect? If so why?

Yes, it's the expected behavior. Normally in BSD world we don't link 
libraries together, since it only hides problems on architectures 
without shared libs (because the .a format doesn't allow for this kind 
of information).

In X the situation is a bit confused by the fact that there's no easy, 
standard way to prevent libtool from doing that. So some libs have 
NEEDED info and other don't.

Since the freetype build system requires GNU make, I had to rewrite BSD 
Makefiles for Freetype2, so they follow the BSD conventions and doesn't 
include this information.

If you use pkg-config to find how to use libfreetype, you should get -lz 
automagically.

One last data point: the default freetype config ships its own gzip 
sources copy and I guess many other distributions still embed this one 
in libfreetype.so instead of using the system version.



--
Matthieu Herrb