X in FC7

[Mike A. Harris]

Avi Kivity wrote:
> Adam Jackson wrote:
>>
>> As said on the wiki page, what problem is xfs trying to solve?  If 
>> it's just about the ability to add fonts at runtime without having to 
>> do 'xset fp rehash', then that should be a very small amount of code 
>> to add to the X server.  You need to watch for directories popping in 
>> and out of existance, but, okay, we know how to do that.
> 
> Wasn't the X font server designed for storageless X terminals?

Was that before or after NFS, Coda, SMB, and numerous other networked
filesystems, etc. existed? ;o)

Seriously, there are arguments for and against keeping/removing xfs,
and I have some mixed feelings myself, but "diskless terminals" seems
like a bad reason to keep xfs.

I think Adam is on the right track about this personally.  xfs was
created to solve certain specific problems, and it was included and
used by default in Red Hat Linux and derivatives for reasons Owen
Taylor mentioned previously, however it doesn't hurt to keep
re-evaluating which of the problems xfs addresses are still
relevant, and to see whether or not they can be solved using other
pre-existing methods, or to see what would be involved to implement
desired functionality with a more modern approach.

My personal feelings on xfs in Fedora Core, are that in an ideal
world, it would be nice to get rid of xfs and use alternative
methods to provide whatever functionality to users that xfs
currently provides - however, that wont come free of cost, and
someone needs to weigh the ups and downs of various potential
solutions, and then decide whether or not any gains received by
getting rid of xfs are worth the manpower, etc. that would need
to be invested into doing so.

IMHO it wouldn't make a lot of good sense to allocate limited resources
to replacing xfs with something else, just to end up with solutions
that do what xfs is already doing right now, unless there are other
major gains that it provides on top of that which make it an overall
worthwhile investment of time.

> You'd just point the X server at the font server, and get the fonts you 
> need, without needing to replace the terminal's ROM.

Or you could just mount the font directories over NFS to the diskless
workstation.