On Jan 10, 2018, at 11:47 PM, Mike Miller <address@hidden> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 19:38:24 -0800, Ben Abbott wrote:
On Jan 10, 2018, at 19:32, Dmitri A. Sergatskov <address@hidden> wrote:
I think freetype is a higher level library that uses Xft on X11 systems.
It's the other way around, Xft is an interface for X11 to use FreeType.
Anyone know why Xft is needed by Octave? Is it used for the GUI, or is it used
for figure text objects?
I think it is needed on GNU/Linux systems for FLTK. The Xft library is
never used by Octave directly, the configure script only checks for it
because a build error may occur on some systems that have FLTK installed
but are missing Xft. It's more like Octave is making sure that the
dependency is installed.
See https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/octave-maintainers/2013-11/msg00629.html
This may no longer be strictly necessary on current systems, but it
might take some effort to be sure that it can be dropped safely.
--
mike