On Tue, 13 May 2008 16:57:02 +0200
Patrick Kursawe <phosphan@g.o> wrote:

> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 09:23:29PM +0000, Andrey Grozin wrote:
> [...] 
> > Most disturbingly, there are a number of packages which (probably)
> > run latex and do neither addwrite nor VARTEXFONTS. An incomplete
> > list of such suspect packages is (for now, I only considered
> > packages not directly related to TeX/LaTeX, i.e., not in dev-tex or
> > dev-texlive and not TeX/LaTeX packages in app-text):
> [...]
> > media-gfx/sane-backends
> [...] 
> > What do you think?
> 
> sane-backends had font generation disabled, but I changed it to the
> VARTEXFONTS method for now. Wouldn't it be better to populate this
> temporary directory with links to existing cached fonts or something
> like this? I don't know much about latex internals, but computing the
> fonts always because one _might_ be written sounds like a bad idea.

Normally VARTEXFONTS is for writting fonts one needs to generate;
however, with the usual default configurations files I've seen,
overriding it will make the various apps needing 'em not see the
default font cache directory. I've committed a new tl-core ebuild with
default configuration files that will let it see the old font cache
directory even if VARTEXFONTS is changed, but will of course write to
VARTEXFONTS.
This should be what you were asking for ;)

Regards,

Alexis.