how to troubleshoot a lobotomized imagemagick on debian etch

[AndrewLinden]

I'm not sure what the short version of my question would be, so I'll just dump the whole story:

I had a convert command that worked great on debian sarge and on ubuntu but was mysteriously broken on debian etch. It was basically a command that was adding text to an image. Something as simple as:

Code: Select all

$ convert -draw "text 10,10 'foo'" bar.jpc fubar.jpc

This was basically a no-op on the etch version (no text would show). When investigating I find:

debian sarge version = 6.0.6
debian etch version = 6.2.4
ubuntu8 version = 6.3.7

When I run 'convert --help' I get a big list of options however the '-list' option is glaringly missing from the debian etch version, so I can't list supported fonts and other things.

I downloaded the source code for the lastest version (6.4.4), installed a bunch of *-dev packages, built, and installed it on the etch machine and it seems to work. Ok fine, but I'd prefer to get it from a maintained package rather than a custom install or custom package.

I guess my questions are... anybody know why the debian etch distribution of imagemagick is brain dead? I'd like to be able to file a bug for debian but don't a good way to describe what is actually wrong. Is it really just a compile-time option misconfig? Or am I missing some shared lib that should be installed on the machine?

[AndrewLinden]

Odd. I could have sworn my compiled version of imagemagick (/usr/local/bin/convert) was working when I posted above, but after I posted it no longer worked. It was complaining about 'gs' not found. I ran 'sudo apt-get install gs' and then it worked. I then tested the original version imagemagick (/usr/bin/convert) and discovered that it also was working. Dunno why it wasn't complaining about not finding 'gs'.

Meanwhile, the original version of convert still has no '-list' option, but I can live with that.

[naoliv]

Hi!

You should report issues with the Debian package directly to us (or you can send a message to pkg-gmagick-im-team@lists.alioth.debian.org if you prefer).

Probably the issue that you had is http://bugs.debian.org/368471
You just need to install the package gsfonts to have it fixed.

Best regards,
Nelson