Clash between 'Cairo' and 'EBImage' packages on Windows

On Mon, 21 Jul 2008, Sklyar, Oleg (London) wrote:

EBImage is dynamically linked against GTK, which includes cairo
libraries, so those are installed along with GTK. Cairo seems to be
statically linking to libcairo.dll.a. I would assume that if it is

That is an import library, so it is actually linked to  
libcairo-2.dll, which it ships.

linked statically it should not get confused with a shared library
present elsewhere in the path, but it looks like it does. I have no
solution for that because unlike Cairo I cannot not statically link
EBImage to GTK as it is not one library that I need, but a bunch of
those.

On Linux you won't get this problem as it uses the same centrally
installed Cairo library.

In a way it would be better, if Cairo relied on the gladewin32.sf.net
which normally provides GTK (and thus cairo libraries) for Windows  
and
linked dynamically, but probably to simplify user installations the
developers wanted to avoid this.

It _is_ using dynamic loading, or there would be no conflict.  From  
the names, it looks very like that it is using a DLL from gladewin32.

The real issue looks rather like a versioning problem, that the  
cairo libraries installed as part of GTK and used by EBImage are way  
too old (cairo_pdf_surface_create was added at cairo 1.2, and cairo  
is at 1.6.4). So updating to the current GTK distribution may be all  
that is needed (and Henrik could also try replacing your GTK's  
libcairo-2.dll by that distributed with Cairo).

There is not much I can do now about this, but I will follow the  
thread
if anybody comes up with an idea to change the code if possible

The Cairo package (which ships DLLs) could rename them, as R itself  
does where it builds its own versions.  Or it could link statically  
(if that works, which it does not for e.g. package XML).

I don't really understand why this was posted to R-devel: it is not  
an R issue.

Dr Oleg Sklyar
Technology Group
Man Investments Ltd
+44 (0)20 7144 3803
osklyar at maninvestments.com

-----Original Message-----
From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org
[mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Henrik Bengtsson
Sent: 19 July 2008 19:26
To: R-devel
Subject: [Rd] Clash between 'Cairo' and 'EBImage' packages on  
Windows

Hi,

on Windows XP Pro with R version 2.7.1 Patched (2008-06-27
r46012) the 'Cairo' and the 'EBImage' packages does not play
well together.

Loading EBImage before Cairo cause the following to happen:

# Rterm --vanilla

library(EBImage);
library(Cairo)

Error in inDL(x, as.logical(local), as.logical(now), ...) :
 unable to load shared library
'C:/PROGRA~1/R/R-2.7.1pat/library/Cairo/libs/Cai
ro.dll':
 LoadLibrary failure:  The specified procedure could not be found.

Error : .onLoad failed in 'loadNamespace' for 'Cairo'
Error: package/namespace load failed for 'Cairo'

with a dialog titled 'Rterm.exe - Entry Point Not Found'
saying 'The procedure entry point cairo_pdf_surface_create
could not be located in the dynamic link library libcairo-2.dll'.

Loading the packages in the reverse order works, but the
Rterm seems unstable, e.g. calling q() immediately after will
exit the R session without questions:

# Rterm --vanilla

library(Cairo)
library(EBImage)
q()

[Immediately back to the command line].

I cannot reproduce the problem on R v2.7.1 on Ubuntu Hardy.

sessionInfo()

R version 2.7.1 Patched (2008-06-27 r46012)
i386-pc-mingw32

locale:
LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252;LC_CTYPE=English_United
States.1252;LC_MON ETARY=English_United
States.1252;LC_NUMERIC=C;LC_TIME=English_United States.1252


attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] EBImage_2.4.0 Cairo_1.4-2

Cheers

Henrik

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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
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