GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 137814
fontconfig showstopper for GIMP
Last modified: 2004-03-21 12:27:26 UTC
Hi I'm pretty sure someone will tell me that it's just a debian thing and i should go somewhere else, but, on the offchance that this is useful for the development of gimp (and perhaps for the enabling of gimp on my machine again), i'll post here. I've been using the 2.0-pre* gimp for a while now, and i love it. Recently, i did a dist-upgrade, and now gimp-1.3 (which is how SID refers to gimp 2, but a gimp-1.3 --version reveals 2.0pre4) won't start up: I get a message that my version of fontconfig is too old. "The Gimp requires fontconfig version 2.2.0 or later. Installed fontconfig version is 1.0.2). Now, i do indeed have fontconfig 1.0.2 installed -- __as_well_as__ 2.2.2 What I am wondering is how gimp refers to fontconfig? I have run an strace on gimp, and actually seen it opening a few fonts, eg open("/var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d/F/FreeSans-Bold.ttf", O_RDONLY) = 5 but gimp still flunks out. Does gimp query against a commandline to get the fontconfig version? if so, what is that command it issues? (i've scoured the strace output and seen nothing about fontconfig per se). On a SID machine, you currently have fontconfig-config that interfaces to the older library, and fc-cache and fc-list that interface to the new one. Maybe i have to fix something up here? The odd thing is that this started just recently: like i say, i have been using gimp-2.0pre* for a while (basically since pre1). Is there anythign else i can do to give more information? If so, please mail me. -dave
Try running "ldd $(which gimp-1.3) | grep fontconfig", it will show the path that libfontconfig is using. This usually is /usr/X11R6/lib for the wrong fontconfig. The library search paths and ordering are defined by /etc/ld.so.conf and if you change it you have to run ldconfig. Look at bug #135878 for a fix. And please next time check if the bug has already been reported. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 121752 ***
I just want to note that GIMP is mainly being developed on Debian sid and the releases are built and tested on debian sarge. So this is definitely not a general problem with gimp2 on Debian. The runtime check was added to catch exactly this problem instead of crashing later.
Thanks for the response. Removing the fontconfig in /usr/X11R6/lib worked fine. I would like to note though, that i *did* search for a matching bug before submitting this. A search for a bug containing the word "fontconfig" pertaining to GIMP, version 2.0pre4, Linux (debian sid or debian), general category, blocker, revealed 2 bugs that weren't pertinant to my issue. Loosening up search terms in the hope of getting a plethora of bugs that i could wade through didn't help. I just have to assume that bugzilla doesn't like me: i have had the same results using bugzilla to report mozilla issues. Still, thanks for your time.
It helps to include resolved bugs in your query. This is not the default.