[tex-live] inclusion of libraries

[Ralf Stubner]

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:

> BTW, what does fontconfig do?  Never heard of it.

It's a library for accessing the fonts installed on a system
(http://www.fontconfig.org/). At least on current GNU/Linux systems it
is used by many programs to find and access fonts. Actually, this
library is a quite interesting case for XeTeX, since it is, of course,
one of the important features of XeTeX to be able to access all fonts
installed on the system. I am not sure if this is possible if XeTeX (and
xdvipdfmx) is linked statically against it's own version, since this
version won't know where to look for system fonts. But I am also not
sure if one could go for dynamic linking here, since I am not sure how
stable the fontconfig library is. AFAIK TL uses dynamic libraries only
for libc and X11 libraries, and that causes already some problems.

cheerio
ralf