rrdtool 1.3.3 and dejavu dependency

Daniel Roethlisberger daniel at roe.ch
Mon Dec 15 09:41:25 PST 2008


Guido Falsi <mad at madpilot.net> 2008-12-15:
> I have noted that the dependency in the subject has been added
> to the rrdtool port.
> 
> This has the unfortunate effect of sucking in a libX11
> dependency(others too...) which was not before.
> 
> Maybe I'm an extremist, but I don't like having X11 pieces on
> headless server machines, I really don't see a reson for
> that(it also triggers some more ports on depending on them,
> since the configures find them...This is annoying at least).

Even as the submitter of the PR in question, I fully agree.

> I don't want to look demanding, but I'd like to spell my
> thought, if anybody cares to listen.
> 
> What is the reson for this added dependency?

rrdtool requires a suitable font for it's graphing features.  It
used to ship with dejavu, but since the update to 1.3.0 it relies
on fonts installed on the system (which the dependency on dejavu
is providing).

> I read the PR but don't really see such effects.. I'm using
> mrtg and smokeping, with mrtg.cgi [1] and mailgraph.cgi. They
> all work fine, mailgraph at least seems to use the
> functionality described in the PR.
> 
> Are we sure it isn't something else which is depending on
> dejavu?

Yes, pretty much.  Note that rrdtool can fall back to other
fonts, such as Bitstream Vera, but if no fonts are found, using
`rrdtool graph` or language bindings such as RRDs::graph will
fail.  I just used Tobi's tutorial [2] to verify this again.

Can you try to reproduce this with no fonts installed under
/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts and using the tutorial [2] as a test?
If it works for you, can you try to find out where it takes the
font from?

I guess it might be possible to make `rrdtool graph` work without
the full install of x11-fonts/dejavu and all it's dependencies by
either creating a lightweight dejavu font port without X11, or by
adding dejavu to the rrdtool port somehow.

I'm all open to better ideas than the current run-time dependency
on x11-fonts/dejavu.  I kind of hoped that the maintainer would
be able to find a better solution, but unfortunately, there was
no reaction from the maintainer.

> Thank you for listening.
> 
> [1] http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/mrtg-rrd/

[2] http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/tut/rrdtutorial.en.html

-- 
Daniel Roethlisberger
http://daniel.roe.ch/


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