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I'm attempting to build a new version of wireshark 1.10 on a RHEL5 box with the intent of making an RPM so that customers that I support can install it. Possibly others if I can find a place to host it.

WS1.10 depends on GTK+ as well as several other libraries that aren't supported by the available rpm packages. Therefore, I have to build them by hand. GTK+ needs pango(1.24.5) with cairo(1.8.8) support.

After having built and installed a newer version of cairo from source, a ./configure of pango gives the following error

checking for CAIRO... yes
checking which cairo font backends could be used... none
configure: Disabling cairo support

and then at the end ./configure displays

configuration:
        backends: X

I can verify that Cairo is installed by looking at the pkg_config in my /usr/local/lib.
I've even taken a look at the pango config.log. But I don't see anything that is any different then the messages I copypasta'ed above.

What are some places I should be looking to figure out a less terse error message? I'm kind of at a loss troubleshooting this.

iain
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Thomas Lann
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  • take a look at the ./configure file, if you look through the bash script you should be able to track down where its looking – benathon Feb 14 '14 at 22:44
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    IMO it's better to look at configure.ac. It seems to me that all that this test is doing is checking for cairo >= 1.7.6 and cairo-ft (on linux) via pkg-config. From your output I guess that you compiled cairo or are trying to compile pango without freetype support. Look for the lines saying "checking for FREETYPE...". – Uli Schlachter Feb 21 '14 at 08:42
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    Did you manage to solve this? I'm having the same problem but on OSX Mavericks – Poliquin Mar 15 '14 at 00:23
  • I didn't solve it. I was actually able to avoid use that version of CENTOS after all. – Thomas Lann Mar 15 '14 at 05:20
  • Hey @ThomasLann, Thanks for posting this question. I've got the same problem and Xiao Jia's answer solve my problem. Could you please accept his answer? – e19293001 Jul 10 '16 at 11:34

2 Answers2

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I encountered this issue today and solved it by installing HARFBUZZ, which is mentioned in the README file of Pango. After installation of Harfbuzz we have access to FreeType. So follow this procedure:

  1. Build and install FreeType
  2. Build and install fontconfig
  3. Build and install Cairo (after ./configure please make sure freetype and fontconfig are found)
  4. Build and install Harfbuzz
  5. Build and install Pango
Xiao Jia
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  • This should be marked as an answer. I had the same problem and it got fixed by building Harfbuzz. Thanks @xiao-jia – Gutemberg Ribeiro Oct 03 '16 at 01:15
  • Same thing can happen with older package versions. The Pango `configure` scripts (at least any I've seen) treat most dependencies as optional, and have less than helpful output... Try `grep "PKG_CONFIG --exists" config.log` to get an idea what was checked for during `configure` – mr.spuratic Apr 04 '18 at 17:40
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In case of you still have problems even though you are following the guideline of Xiao Jia, take care to look into config.log. It will help you to find out why the package does not find particular components on your system. In my case the fontconfig-devel and freetype-devel package from default repository of my distro was too old.

I could manage it by installing the whole stack into a location outside of /usr (not that difficult as it sounds) by adding configuration file to /etc/ld.so.conf.d and a environment expanding script to /etc/profile.d.

Maik Greubel
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