Bug 204129 – update-webkitgtk-libs fails to run on Ubuntu 18.04

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: WebKitGTK

[Eric Zurcher]

An admittedly naive attempt to build WebKitGtk from current git source fails with this message:

/home/zur003/WebKit/WebKitBuild/DependenciesGTK/Source/freetype-2.9.1/src/base/ftver.rc:19:9: fatal error: windows.h: No such file or directory
 #include<windows.h>
         ^~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
windres: preprocessing failed.

[Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez]

(In reply to Eric Zurcher from comment #0)
> An admittedly naive attempt to build WebKitGtk from current git source fails
> with this message:
> 
> /home/zur003/WebKit/WebKitBuild/DependenciesGTK/Source/freetype-2.9.1/src/
> base/ftver.rc:19:9: fatal error: windows.h: No such file or directory
>  #include<windows.h>
>          ^~~~~~~~~~~
> compilation terminated.
> windres: preprocessing failed.

That's very strange.

Are you sure you are building on Ubuntu 18.04?

For what I can see on the freetype code that file, ftver.rc should be only included when building on Windows.

Also, your log failures contains: "windres: preprocessing failed." ... that means you have the windres tool on Ubuntu? windres is a Windows tools AFAIK.

What is the output of the following commands on your system?

dpkg -S $(which windres)
uname -a
lsb_release -a

[Eric Zurcher]

Yes, definitely on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
lsb_release -a returns:

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
Release:	18.04
Codename:	bionic

uname -a returns:

Linux blend-bp 4.15.0-66-generic #75-Ubuntu SMP Tue Oct 1 05:24:09 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

dpkg -S $(which windres) returns:

dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /usr/bin/windres

The windres binary is there because of other cross-platform work that has been done on this machine. I don't recall its source, but it identifies itself as :

GNU windres (GNU Binutils) 2.30
Copyright (C) 2018 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

So maybe I should just move windres out of the way temporarily and see what happens?

[Eric Zurcher]

Ah, it looks like windres came in with the binutils-mingw-w64-x86-64 package.

[Eric Zurcher]

And now I recall. I needed windres for some work I was doing a few years ago, but didn't want to type in the lengthy name of x86_64-w64-mingw32-windres, so I set up a symbolic link of just "windres". Getting rid of that symbolic link allows the update-webkitgtk-libs script to execute normally. Problem solved. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

[Eric Zurcher]

I'm closing this, although arguably the presence of a windres executable on the path shouldn't cause the script to fail.

[Carlos Alberto Lopez Perez]

(In reply to Eric Zurcher from comment #5)
> I'm closing this, although arguably the presence of a windres executable on
> the path shouldn't cause the script to fail.

That's right. That seems a bug on the freetype configure script. 

I see it seems to support cmake as well, hopefully on the next update of this dependency we can switch to using cmake instead of autotools.