Re: libpng clarification

["Steve M. Robbins" <steven.robbins@videotron.ca>]

Hi,

Chris Cheney asks

    So gnome doesn't use imlib (in Debian at least it seems to), or
    did I somehow miss why it appears RedHat only has one version of
    imlib, which is the version compiled against libpng12?

Red Hat hacked gdk-imlib so that libraries loaded as "modules"
(like png) do NOT put their symbols in the global table.  So they
can link with png3 but the clients of gdk-imlib don't see the
png3 symbols.

If you now wonder why Debian doesn't do that, the answer is that
gdk-imlib is not the only Gnome 1 library that uses png.  (The other
one is gdk_pixbuf) Before I knew that, I *did* employ the Red Hat
patch on gdk-imlib.  It was an unmitigated disaster because programs
that linked with both imlib and pixbuf started crashing.  In the end,
it seemed best to just introduce a second source package so that I
could build gdk-imblib1 with png2, and a new imlib with png3.

-Steve