wolfram-engine dependent on libharfbuzz0a

[Mequa]

Taking a look at the dependencies for wolfram-engine on Raspbian, I noticed that one of its dependencies is libharfbuzz0a.

This may be a problem when migrating to Raspbian Jessie since this library is replaced with libharfbuzz0b, which very much clashes with the older HarfBuzz library, and it appears the closed-source Wolfram software is linked against the older library. Are Wolfram planning any updates to fix this issue?

(In addition: Such an update would also be needed if Wolfram ever plan to support Ubuntu 15.04 in addition to Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi 2 as a licensed platform for running Mathematica and Wolfram Language, which I seriously hope they would consider.)

[tgwena]

I made the same observation some time ago when I installed Jessie. Would it be possible to force Jessie to install libharbuzz0a from Wheezy for now?

[Mequa]

I made the same observation some time ago when I installed Jessie. Would it be possible to force Jessie to install libharbuzz0a from Wheezy for now?

It's possible to force the install of libharbuzz0a from the appropriate .deb file(s), however that would clash with core software on Jessie which depends on libharfbuzz0b and would force all the latter to be removed, bricking the Raspbian Jessie install. This is going to need an update from Wolfram to run on Jessie, linking it against libharfbuzz0b, as it's closed source.

The same update will also be required if this is to have a chance to run on Ubuntu MATE 15.04 on the Raspberry Pi 2 (if Wolfram permit that under their licence and don't lock it down strictly to Raspbian, again that depends on the Wolfram team).

[ShiftPlusOne]

You could always just wait. The next release will still come with wolfram-engine and it will be jessie-based, so this 'problem' will just go away.

[Mequa]

You could always just wait. The next release will still come with wolfram-engine and it will be jessie-based, so this 'problem' will just go away.

Is there any timeframe for this next release? (Hopefully that will also fix compatibility issues with HW-accelerated Web/Epiphany on Raspbian Jessie, in addition to Wolfram's generous bundle...)

[ShiftPlusOne]

The new packages in jessie have affected Epiphany quite a bit and a lot of collabora's work needs to be re-implemented. It's hard to say how long that will take.