undefined symbol: gegl_rectangle_subtract

[Heather Ellsworth]

I'm running focal and have both the snap and the deb of gimp installed.

The snap runs just fine (although there is a GeglBuffer leak: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/gimp-geglbuffer-leak/15732).

However, if I run the deb from the command line, it won't start and fails with:

heather@bmo:~$ gimp
gimp: /usr/local/lib/libbabl-0.1.so.0: no version information available (required by gimp)
gimp: /usr/local/lib/libbabl-0.1.so.0: no version information available (required by /lib/libgimpwidgets-2.0.so.0)
gimp: /usr/local/lib/libbabl-0.1.so.0: no version information available (required by /lib/libgimpcolor-2.0.so.0)
gimp: symbol lookup error: gimp: undefined symbol: gegl_rectangle_subtract

libgegl is installed but maybe there's an additional gimp/gegl package that provides this symbol and would need to be included in main for the gimp deb to work:

heather@bmo:~$ dpkg -l | grep gegl
ii gir1.2-gegl-0.4:amd64 0.4.22-1 amd64 GObject introspection data for the Generic Graphics Library
ii libgegl-0.4-0:amd64 0.4.22-1 amd64 Generic Graphics Library
ii libgegl-common 0.4.22-1 all Generic Graphics Library - common files
ii libgegl-dev:amd64 0.4.22-1 amd64 Generic Graphics Library (development files)

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: gimp 2.10.14-2ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-14.17-generic 5.4.18
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-14-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu18
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Fri Feb 28 07:59:36 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-09-11 (169 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" - Release amd64 (20190416)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=screen
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gimp
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-01-17 (41 days ago)

[Heather Ellsworth (hellsworth)]

A freshly installed focal system doesn't come with gimp and installing it from apt and runnning it works just fine. On a system that experiences this undefined symbol, uninstalling gimp (and autoremove) and reinstalling it fixes the problem. I'm not sure why this fixes the issue because libgegl is the same versions installed previously.. and the same gegl packages get installed.

[Heather Ellsworth (hellsworth)]

False alarm everyone. This was just an issue on my host that had some weird things installed. I can't reproduce this on another system so closing.

[Heather Ellsworth (hellsworth)]

In case anyone else hits this, perhaps this will help...

Another user ran into this very issue on a Debian system but removing gimp and reinstalling didn't fix the issue.

In order to find the conflicting library, the user removed gimp and it's dependencies then searched for any remaining libraries to manually remove:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge gimp
$ sudo find / -iname "*babl*"
$ sudo find / -iname "*gegl*"
$ sudo find / -iname "*gimp*"

Remove any lingering libraries before re-installing gimp.