gnumeric plugin problems

[don <dmr_ns1 attbi com>]

On 14 Feb, 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 probelem too, here is what caused it.

After reading Jody Goldberg's suggestion to look for libxml2, I 
ran ldd on the binary.  There was libxml.so.1, but also further
on was libxml.so.2!  Now /usr/lib/libxml.so was linked to libxml.so.1
so I was confused for a while.

It turns out I had loaded libxml-2.2 once, which must have been and
early version of what is now libxml2.  After getting rid of it (and
running ldconfig), I still had troubles, some of my other packages had
been linked against it.

Eventually I had to run ldd on all of the installed libs to find the cause.

for f in /usr/lib/lib*.so*; do if ldd $f | grep libxml; then echo $f; fi; done

(If a dist uses /opt/gnome/lib, that should be checked too.)

This showed gnome-print and libglade.  Rebuilding them against libxml-1.8.14
took care of the libxml.so.2 problem.

But then gnumeric would not link.  I'll follow this with a separate note on
that problem.

Don Reid