[metapost] Trying to figure out MPLib

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hi,

On 08/03/2012 04:43 PM, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
>
> So given your patch for the kpathsea problem, does this mean that I
> can execute a program linked against the libmplib.a as it is produced
> by compiling the tarball on a system which does not have TeX?

Yes.

> What
> will happen if a label command is included in the command argument I
> pass to mp_execute and the system doesn't have the least trace of TeX
> on it?

For a TeX label, nothing will happen. For an actually typeset metapost
string, you will get an error in the 'terminal' and 'log' outputs
because the font and its support files will not be present. These
are not fatal errors, so perhaps it does not bother you.

> And pardon me if I missed this somewhere, but does the source-tree as
> it is distributed even have a *build*-dependency on any
> TeX-components?

It is set out not to need a pre-existing installation of any kind of
TeX/MP, but it is vaguely possible that something crept in because
my system is littered with TeX and mp installations and at times it
is amazingly hard to keep autoconf 'localized'.

> Also, can you please point me to where in the source tree I should go
> to make a shared library out of MPost rather than the static library
> which is produced right now?

That's tricky; the build system is set up to create only a static
library at the moment, and it would require some autoconf jiggling
to switch to allowing .so creation as well. If that is important to
you, I can investigate, but that will take me some time.

Best wishes,
Taco