Re: postinstall: fontconfig abnormal exit

[Ken Brown <kbrown@cornell.edu>]

On 9/11/2020 7:31 AM, Marco Atzeri via Cygwin wrote:
> On 11.09.2020 10:32, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via Cygwin wrote:
>> On 11/09/2020 08:22, Fergus Daly via Cygwin wrote:
>>>> On 2020-09-10 04:57, Fergus Daly via Cygwin wrote:
>>>>>>>> Sorry if this has been asked 4 million times already.
>>>>>>> $ head /etc/postinstall/{fontconfig_dtd,libxml2}.*
>>>>>>                     ==> /etc/postinstall/fontconfig_dtd.sh.done <==
>>>> hmmm.  i don't understand exactly what this thread is about, but i do know 
>>>> that on my latest fresh install of cygwin,
>>>> the fontconfig_dtd install is claiming an error at the end.
>>>> is this related to that ?
>>> Exactly. On first setup and all subsequent updates this post-installation 
>>> error recurs.
>>> The cure described depends on the presence of several files including one 
>>> that the script creates if necessary.
>>>
>>> PS Before I enlisted help to cure this glitch "properly", I found it and its 
>>> recurrence sufficiently intrusive to become an annoyance.
>>> Since nothing was obviously broken I guessed that nothing further would be 
>>> broken by artificially achieving the post-installation
>>> sequence as follows:
>>> $ mv /etc/postinstall/fontconfig_dtd.sh /etc/postinstall/fontconfig_dtd.sh.done
> 
> this remove the action, does not solve it
> 
> what`s happen if you just run
> 
>    /etc/postinstall/fontconfig_dtd.sh
> 
> any error message ?
> 
>>> And so it transpired: nothing awful seemed to happen, or fail to happen, as a 
>>> consequence of this "fix"; and the error msg stopped.
>>
>> I agree this should be fixed - it is annoying, and I also don't think
>> it's a new bug by any stretch: I had this last September when I was
>> first looking at getting wxPython to compile in Cygwin.
>>
>> Also it's, in my opinion, not a great user experience to have end users
>> immediately thing something is wrong after the first install. Despite
>> the fact that it doesn't seem to matter, it doesn't inspire confidence
>> for first-time users. I haven't followed this very closely so I'm aware
>> it might be hard to fix, and I very much appreciate all the effort put
>> in to Cygwin, but I reckon this one would help a lot with the first
>> impressions & attitude of a new Cygwin user.
>>
>> Hamish
>>
> 
> check on /var/log/setup.log.full for any hints on what is going wrong
> 
> Installing just base+fontconfig is not providing any error,
> so it must be an interaction of fontconfig with some other package

You can reproduce the problem by doing a fresh install and choosing 
libfontconfig-common and libxml2.  setup.log.full shows

running: C:\cygwin64temp\bin\bash.exe --norc --noprofile 
"/etc/postinstall/fontconfig_dtd.sh"
could not open /etc/xml/catalog for saving

Marco, libxml2 used to have a postinstall script that would create /etc/xml/catalog:

$ cat /etc/postinstall/libxml2.sh.done
if test ! -f /etc/xml/catalog; then
         /bin/mkdir -p /etc/xml
         /usr/bin/xmlcatalog --noout --create /etc/xml/catalog
fi

But this seems to have disappeared from the most recent release.

Ken