[mapserver-users] GD/Freetype Problem (was: No ImageOutput)

[Daniel Morissette]

Steve Lime wrote:
> 
> Freetype configuration seems screwed up to me. If you have 2.0 and 1.3
> on the same box it's difficult to compile against 1.3 even if you try
> and force it. I finally gave up with 1.3 on my Linux box (RH 7.0) and am
> developing against 2.0. Might you have multiple versions of Freetype
> installed? Just an idea.
> 
> I think we should consider changing the behavior in configure...
> 


I fully agree that the freetype config is a mess, but it's not only the
case for MapServer, it is for PHP too at least... it can take 3 or 4
tries sometimes to get PHP to detect freetype properly, and PHP is a
much "bigger" project than MapServer so we would expect it to be much
more solid for those things.  I think it's the cascading dependencies
between an application (MapServer or PHP), and a library (GD) that uses
another library (freetype) that makes all this a huge mess to manage in
configure.  To make things worse, Linux distributions often come with
both freetype 1.3 and 2.0 and place them in odd locations (RedHat at
least does), and this is the source of several problems.  

I added a little while ago the --enable-force-freetype1 configure option
to deal with RedHat systems and ask configure to detect freetype1 in
priority (it will detect freetype 2 in priority by default) and that
helped, but doesn't solve all problems.

Over time there have been changes to the GD/freetype part of configure
that made things work better for some configurations, but caused
problems for other configurations that used to work... so we almost need
someone dedicated to maintaining that part of configure and _that would
be ready to_ deal with all compile issues reported in that area in the
future... any volounteer?

Daniel
-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
 Daniel Morissette               morissette at dmsolutions.ca
 DM Solutions Group              http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
------------------------------------------------------------
  Don't put for tomorrow what you can do today, because if 
      you enjoy it today you can do it again tomorrow.