It seems that everytime I update cairo, another annoying bug pops up. This one is actually a regression: the exact same bug had been fixed in cairo-0.9.3, and now they reintroduced it. It seems that their code is only ever tested on GNU/Linux with all the latest libraries. Solaris and BSD systems are especially likely to blow up.

I have submitted the following text as fd.o bug 17450. Sorry if this wlog is becoming just a dump for upstream bugreports.

"I am trying to compile cairo 1.6.4 on MirOS BSD (an OpenBSD variant). The fontconfig included in the base system does not have the FcFini() function. As I gathered from searching the mailing list archives, this function is optional. However, on systems without FcFini(), the freetype backend is completely disabled.

"From reading the source code, I do not think that FcFini is really essential, and any calls to it are protected by #ifdef HAVE_FCFINI anyway. Thus, I made a small patch for the configure script to make a missing FcFini non-fatal for the freetype font backend.

"What's ironic is that this bug had already existed as bug 3951. It was fixed in 0.9.3."