[Mono-list] Cairo dependency issues and Xft

[Marcus]

I wanted to mention this in case anyone else runs into this problem. Cairo was 
recently added to Mono as a dependency. (If Cairo were detected and its use 
disabled when not present, I might call it an *optional* dependency, but this 
is not the case.

One of the (recursive?) dependencies of Cairo is xft.pc, which is not part of 
the XFree86 development packages on my distro (SuSE 8.0). So I installed 
xft-2.1.2 and subsequently built Cairo, et. al. Things worked fine until I 
attempted to rebuild by KDE system from sources: the resulting KDE system 
refused to work.

It appears that the problem is that XFree11 includes its own libXft.so.1, and 
the libXft.so.2 from xft-2.1.2 was getting picked up instead, resulting in 
bizarre problems.

I finally removed xft-2.1.2 and rebuild KDE, which fixed all the problems. Of 
course, I cannot use Cairo now, but the problems are gone.

I wrote this hoping to save some people some trouble. (Standard disclaimer: 
I'm very happy with SuSE in general. I know that my distro version is aging. 
SuSE costs $40, and downloading isn't an option because dialup is the only 
game in my area of town.)