[R] [Rd] R/Sweave/cairo/freetype bug fix.

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Perhaps that's too much details. There is (will be) a new freetype because of cairo's unanticipated usage (which R uses, among other cairo users). Most people should upgrade or request an upgrade eventually, when they are comfortable.

--- On Sat, 30/3/13, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Huh?
> 
> This is utterly incomprehensible without reading the redhat
> bugzilla, and even after reading, I'm not sure what the
> issue is. Something with bold Chinese fonts in X11, but
> maybe also affecting Latin fonts, ....?
> 
> Please explain yourself.
> 
> -pd
> 
> On Mar 30, 2013, at 09:25 , Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
> 
> > The problem was first seen with R/Sweave (#c0) then
> reproduced directly with cairo (#c10) and was eventually
> traced to freetype. The 5-part bug fix:
> > 610ee58e07090ead529849b2a454bb6c503b4995
> > da11e5e7647b668dee46fd0418ea5ecbc33ae3b2
> > e1a2ac1900f2f16ec48fb4840a6b7965a8373c2b
> > 869fb8c49ddf292d6daf4826172a308973d3e11f
> > d56e544d653b09c657911629557ffc5277a503e3
> > was committed to freetype in January and will form the
> next release (2.4.12). They were back ported to 2.4.11
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891457#c35
> > and the redhat people had further back-ported it to
> 2.4.10 for fedora 18/19 (#c51).
> > 
> > The freetype people had reproduced the problem with a
> latin font, so this affects most people, unlike what the
> initial report (#c0) suggests.
> > 
> > Since freetype is part of X11, most unix/linux users
> would be understandably nervous about breaking X (see #c45
> for screenshot of broken gnome terminal!) and should wait up
> to a year before the new and not-yet-released 2.4.12 becomes
> an official upgrade; or contact their favourite unix vendors
> and/or Apple for upgrades. AFAIK, current up-to-date linux
> distributions ships the rather older 2.4.10, with the
> exception of fedora 18/19 (#c51). Mac OS X 10.5 ships
> freetype 2.3.5 as part of X11; I haven't bother looking up
> later Mac OS X's.
> > 
> > The official R binaries for windows and mac OS X are
> compiled against static libraries of cairo 1.10.2 (over 2
> years old), and cairo 1.11.2 and freetype 2.4.4
> respectively, and are firmly in the "do not work correctly"
> category.
> > 
> > The long and short of the story is that R/Sweave uses a
> feature of cairo which wasn't implemented before cairo
> 1.11.2 (#c13, Jan 2011), which in turn depends on a feature
> of freetype that has been around since 2005 but did not
> anticipate cairo's usage. It is commendable that the
> freetype people did not refer to cairo's usage as "misuse"
> but took the patience to address the problem, unlike some
> group's style.
> > 
> > It has been an interesting few months returning to
> freetype after about 17 years, I think.
> > 
> > Here is how to look up what version of freetype -
> libfreetype.so.x.y.z for most unix platforms, and
> /usr/X11/lib/libfreetype.x.y.z.dylib on Mac OS X:
> > 
> > (excerpt from docs/VERSION.DLL)
> > 
> >     version   
> x.y.z   date of release
> >     2.4.11 
>    6.10.0  Dec 2012
> >     2.4.10 
>    6.9.0   June 2012
> >     2.4.9     
> 6.8.1   March 2012
> > ...
> >     2.4.4     
> 6.6.2   Nov 2010  (official R mac
> binaries)
> > ...
> >     2.3.5     
> 6.3.16  July 2007 (Mac OS X 10.5)
> > 
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel at r-project.org
> mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
> -- 
> Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk 
> Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
> 
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