RFC: Making the xfs font server optional in Fedora Core and its derivatives.

[Mike A. Harris]

Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 01:16 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>> On the other hand, there are many applications included both
>> in Fedora Core, and in Fedora Extras, which do rely on the
>> core fonts system still, and are likely to rely on it for the
>> forseeable future. 
> 
> Great to hear we're moving in this direction. 
> 
> I guess the obvious question is "what will break?". Once we
> have a clear idea what really depends on xfs (some packages, 
> like wine, _can_ work with xfs if it's the only available 
> option, or without), we can devise a plan of making xfs 
> optional (moved to Extra along with all apps that depend 
> on it?).

No apps[1] require xfs.  Lots of apps require "core fonts"
support.  We currently provide core fonts support via the
xfs font server, however the X server is equally capable
of serving fonts on its own without a separate font server.

Aside from disabling xfs by default, what needs to change
is exactly how we go from configuring core fonts using
chkfontpath which twiddles the xfs config, to a setup
that twiddles the X server config, which also works
properly through OS upgrades via anaconda and also via
yum.  That's the tricky part.

The second tricky part is that there are probably a number
of people out there who enable TCP support in xfs, to run
it over the network to serve fonts to multiple machines.
If we switch to using the X server, everyone who
intentionally wants to use xfs either in networked mode,
or in local mode, will have to manually configure their
font server.

There are definitely some complexities to sort through.



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.