[tex-live] Comment on libfontconfig

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Before rushing off to adopt and use libfontconfig, please remember
that it is not universally available on Unix systems.

I just surveyed a couple of dozen different Unix platforms, and found
that it is available in /usr/lib on these

	Cygwin on Windows XP	IA-32
	GNU/Linux		AMD64, IA-32, IA-64, MIPS, SPARC (Fedora, Gentoo, Red Hat, SuSE)
	GNU/Linux		PowerPC (Gentoo Base System version 1.12.4)
	Solaris 9 and 10	SPARC and IA-32

and absent from these

	FreeBSD 5.0 and 6.1	IA-32
	GNU/Linux		PowerPC (Yellow Dog Linux release 2.3 (Dayton))
	HP-UX			IA-64 and PA-RISC
	IRIX 6.5		MIPS
	Mac OS X		PowerPC and EM64T
	NetBSD 1.6		IA-32
	NetBSD 3.0		VAX
	OpenBSD	3.5		VAX
	OpenBSD	3.9		IA-32
	OSF/1 4.0		Alpha
	Solaris 7 and 8		SPARC

Given that there are scores of GNU/Linux distributions, there may well
be others that fail to provide libfontconfig.

I have installed it myself in /usr/local/lib on several of our
platforms, but not all.  As list members have commented on, this
raises a potential mess of version dependence.  If a config file is in
/usr/, I have about about a hundred systems that need to be updated.
If it is /usr/local, a single copy can be shared across all operating
systems, or at least across architectures.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
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