Platform: Intel Pentium M,
debian sarge (testing/unstable),
libexpat1 1.95.6-8,
libqt3c102-mt,
fontconfig 2.2.3-1
After an apt-get dist-upgrade, my own Qt application got a strange
error. It printed out the following lines to the console
Fontconfig error: line 1: unknown encoding
Fontconfig error: Cannot load default config file
and started up with a strange-looking font called "Arioso", when what
I expected was Helvetica.
I traced this down to the application being linked with two separate
expat shared libraries, the one native to debian sarge, used by
fontconfig to read its configuration files, and a different version
used with my application.
The problem is that the native expat on debian sarge is compiled to
use single width char with UTF-8, while the version used by my
application is compiled to use unsigned short with UTF-16 (to be a
best fit to QString and QConstString).
As I see it, I have the following paths open to me:
1. convert my application to use the UTF-8 API, and use the native
shared lib for everything
2. create an extra header file, which prefixes all symbols of my
application's version of expat with some "prefix_"
3. manually edit my application's version of expat, and add "prefix_"
to all non-static symbols
Does anyone have any better ideas? I'm open to all suggestions.
I have already tried alternative 1, and I know that works. My
application started up without the fonconfig error messages, and using
Helvetica as its font. But this approach will give me a serious
performance hit when parsing big XML files, because of the added
string copying and UTF-8 to UTF-16 conversion.
I'd rather avoid alternative 3 if I can. I prefer to keep the expat
source in local CVS as pristine as possible, to ease upgrades.
I'm currently trying to do 2. with the help of a perl script. But
according to "nm -op" there's a lot of exported symbols in an expat
shared lib... so far I haven't been successful in eliminating the
error.
One thing I tried, that didn't work out, was to make my application's
version of expat be a static lib, with the .o files compiled with
-fPIC. That just made the shared library linked with expat (my
application consists of a lot of shared libraries) export the symbols
that conflicted with the native expat.
As I said, I'm open to suggestions!
Thanx!
- Steinar
