Re: [gentoo-dev] Fonts, Xfree, Linux

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Friday 30 May 2003 11:30, Seemant Kulleen wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> OK, the above combination, as we all know, blows dogs.  Having said that, I
> have some ideas.  First, to reiterate as in my last e-mail: xfree-4.3.0-r3
> is moving towards *NOT* installing *ANY* fonts at all.  All the xfree
> built-in fonts will move to separate packages in media-fonts.  Additionally
> *ALL* fonts will be in /usr/share/fonts, rather than
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts (and I had to hold back from exaggerating it to
> say /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/R6/include/lib/X/X11/X11R6/misc/lib/fonts :P).
>
> The idea is that this will be a centralised location for system fonts.  All
> user custom fonts would go into /usr/share/fonts (or perhaps
> /usr/local/share/fonts -- not sure on that one, and not sure how much
> complexity it would add).
>
> Anyway, RedHat developed a tool called chkfontpath which updates
> /etc/X11/fs/config with font paths to be added, removed, queried and what
> not. It seems most binary distros distribute this utility.  We had a look
> at it (popt is a required dependency for it), and I've asked Graham
> (vladimir@g.o) to come up with a perl equivalent for it.  To me, it seems
> that coding that in C and using popt is overkill.
>
> So the idea he and I discussed was to have this utility (or set of
> utilities) to update the fontpaths in /etc/X11/fs/config as well as
> /etc/X11/XF86Config (IF the font path is other than unix:/7100 in that
> file).
>
> Now, here's the question.  Gentoo policy dictates that we do not touch
> files in /etc.  During emerge, this is fine, we can provide a file to be
> etc-update'd.  The concern is during emerge unmerge, when a font path is to
> be removed.
>
> I guess the question is: do we violate policy on these two files, or is
> there a more clever solution to this?  One thought which comes up is to
> have the utility just check which font paths exist in /usr/share/fonts and
> make sure both files have them.  Again, that would violate policy :/
>
> The other thought which arises is to have those files in /usr/share/xfree
> or some such, but I'm not entirely comfortable with that, either.
>

I think we could have some utility that takes the real XF86Config and creates 
a new file for it. This could just be ._cfg0001_XF86Config, where it checks 
for other versions and if the differences are only with the fonts overwrites 
it, else not. This way we simulate config protection.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Researcher
Mail: pauldv@××××××.nl
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net