[wellylug] Abiword crashes with libfribidi0 problems

[Daniel Pittman]

Adam Bogacki <afb at paradise.net.nz> writes:

> I recently pinned unstable and testing sources to my Etch
> 'sources.list' and updated frequently used applications, including
> Abiword.

Ouch.  No wonder you have problems with your system -- this is pretty
much never a good idea.  You will do much better using one of:

 * testing everywhere, no pinning
 * backports.org
 * Ubuntu[1]
 * manually backporting the packages you want

Those are much, much better solutions than trying to run a mixed release
system through pinning.

> However, when I try to enter text it crashes with gnome-terminal error
> message ..
>
> abiword: symbol lookup error: abiword: undefined symbol:
> fribidi_get_type

You have a conflict between the version of the fribidi code on your
system and the version of abiword.  You can probably resolve this by
either updating to the latest fribidi and abiword or, possibly, by
building abiword against the version of fribidi installed on your
machine.

This sort of problem is typical of the issues that a mixed release with
pinning presents: you have a symbol conflict between the version of
fribidi Abiword was built with and the version you have installed.

At least it wasn't an ABI conflict that led to memory corruption and
random crashes during normal operation. ;)

[...]

> Can anyone suggest a fix ?

Any of the better ideas suggested above will improve your lot here.

Regards,
        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  As in, the distribution that take and stabilize a snapshot of
     testing every six months or so, not because it is "better" or
     anything like that.  

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