[Devel] freetype 2.1.7 on PowerPC

[Dan Burcaw]

Folks,

There seems to be a bug in freetype 2.1.7 on PowerPC.
We see this when building XFree86 4.4.0 with an external freetype
(version 2.1.7). During XFree86's "make World", the 'mkfontscale'
program is run:

(from xc/fonts/scaled/Type1/)
 ../../../exports/bin/mkfontscale 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../../../exports/lib  ../../../exports/bin/mkfontscale 
.
 make[4]: *** [fonts.scale] Illegal instruction

As you can see, mkfontscale dies with an illegal instruction. We've
traced this back to freetype. When compiling freetype 2.1.7 with -O0,
the problem goes away. With more investigation, we do not need to
disable optimizations, just compile freetype with -fno-strict-aliasing.

So, given a bit more tracing, we think there's an aliasing bug in the
ptr manipulations in the FT_FACE_*_SERVICE macros.

In addition, I see that Mandrake is using -O0 in their freetype 2.1.7
spec file, and Red Hat is currently seeing this failure on PowerPC and
several other architectures (trying to find out which).

Regards,
Dan Burcaw
Terra Soft Solutions, Inc.
Yellow Dog Linux