Re: Erroneus error message or what?

[Villum Sejersen]

On 05-11-2014 08:46, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > Lately, building lilypond, I have occationally encountered a strange
> > error-massage:
> >
> > ERROR: Please install required programs: /usr/local/bin/fontforge >=
> > 20110222 (installed: 3ec845c4fe718af4908ce2dc25b66d0594930)
> >
> > BUT: There IS installed a version of fontforge (with the quoted hash,
> > at the specified location, and it is definitely newer than 2011):
> Exactly this is the problem: LilyPond's configure script doesn't
> properly parse the current fontforge version string.
>
> > In the long run this is an insecure situation. Can it be remedied?
> Well, I guess that fontforge will provide a `normalized' version
> string as soon as there is a new, official release – right now, the
> current FontForge test releases are *really* far from stable.  Until
> then, you might try the attached patch.[*]
>
>
>      Werner
>
>
> [*] This patch was rejected because of philosophical reasons (to which    I 
> agree basically).  However, I don't have time to improve it.

Thank you very much for your detailed explanation.

Is there an open bug tracker entry for this?

I sincerely hope so! Because I must consider it a considerable bug, that
the Lilypond build system reports an error, where not even a warning is
really explicable. Returning a wrong errorlevel in the middle of a build
process should never happen...

Isn't it possible as an interim solution just simply only to test for
the date string(s) in the fontforge --version message?:

Copyright (c) 2000-2014 by George Williams. See AUTHORS for Contributors.
 License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
<http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
 with many parts BSD <http://fontforge.org/license.html>. Please read
LICENSE.
 Based on sources from 03:36 CET 27-Nov-2014-ML-D.
 Based on source from git with hash:
c4cea471798c92848170c2f47311979805966093
fontforge 03:36 CET 27-Nov-2014
libfontforge 20141127
r

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