Confused by freetype versions (pkg-config)

Question

I have freetype2 installed on my system but I am also trying to install it from source, as well.

My installed version is here: /usr/lib64/pkgconfig/freetype2.pc . That file is listed as version 20.0.14 .

To compile another tool, namely fontconfig , I need freetype2 >= 21.0.15 .

So I downloaded freetype2 from its source git repo .

The trouble I'm having is that repository doesn't list any version even close to 21.0.15+. All of the tags in that repository are listed as VER-2-6-2 , VER-2-9 , VER-2-9-1 , etc. And the generated freetype.pc file which is created after compilation are also listed as 2.6.2 , 2.9 , 2.9.1 , etc. The version number is not 21.0.15 or even 20.0.14 , which my CentOS 7.6 already has.

What determines the listed version in the freetype.pc file? Where can I find the version of freetype that will create a.pc file of >= 21.0.15+ ? Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Apparently the reason is because I was building freetype using CMake. And in the CMakeLists.txt, it's defining a version based on the version of freetype.

# . `CMakeLists.txt' is provided as-is since it is normally not used by the
#   developer team.

So it's unsupported. That's why the version number doesn't match.

In reality, the version number actually comes from libtool. See this table . eg I was building 2.10.0 freetype, so the freetype.pc should have been written with a version of 23.0.17

And if you build using configure, instead of cmake, you can find that exact same version 23.0.17 listed as "23:0:17" in the builds/unix/configure.raw file.