"Building your own FreeType library is can be harmful"

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 11:46:51AM +0100, Peter Åstrand wrote:
> I'm building the latest xorg from CVS with:
> 
> #define HasFreetype2 NO
> 
> When compiling, I get lot's of:
> 
> #warning Building your own FreeType library is deprecated and can be 
> harmful.
> #warning If your distribution supplies a FreeType library, you are urged to
> #warning consider using it instead.
> 
> Can anyone explain to me why this is bad and "harmful"? I'm building a 
> Xserver (Xvnc) binary that should work on multiple distributions, so I 
> cannot rely on the distribution providing a certain Freetype version.

If this is true, then you will need to link a static version of
libfreetype in any case, which is not done by the default distribution
as I understand it.

In any case, the argument is that for consistency on any given system,
you should stick to the vendor-provided FreeType, as everything else on
your system will be built against the same version.  Also, in the event
that there is a security fix upstream, it's one more place you need to
patch and update.
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