gnumeric plugin problems & xmlFree

[don <dmr_st1 attbi com>]

My appologies if this is a duplicate, I tried to post this yesterday but
outsmarted myself in an attempt to use a "scratch" address to reduce spam.


On 14 Feb 02, John Thompson <john thompson attglobal net> wrote:
> I have just compiled and installed gnumeric-1.0.4 on my system, and
> although the program appears to work, none of the plugins are recognized.
> When I start gnumeric, it complains:
>
>         Errors while initializing plugin system
>
>         Errors while reading info about available plugins
>
>         Errors occurred while reading plugn informations from file

I had this problem too.  The cause turned out to be that libxml.so.2 was
getting linked as well as libxml.so.1  Not directly, but because some other
libraries wanted it.

I think this library was an early version of what is now libxml2.  I had
loaded it some time back.  I had to run ldd on all of the libraries in
/usr/lib (and other locations if you use them) to find the culprits.
Then remove libxml.so.2* and rebuild the libraries that has used it.

Then gnumeric would not link!  The error was that xmlFree was not defined.
THere were two xml include directories, /usr/include/libxml & /usr/include/gnome-xml.
The required libxml-1.8.14 (and 1.8.17) only creates the latter.  The first
must also be left over.  They defined xmlFree differently.

For some reason the gnumeric Makefile references both of these two directories.
Is that an error?

Don Reid