Planned change to xorg-x11-font-utils

Tom "spot" Callaway tcallawa at redhat.com
Sat Dec 8 02:31:49 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 10:08 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 06:12 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Adam Jackson <ajackson <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > > I plan to drop bdftruncate from font-utils to get rid of the perl bloat,
> > > unless someone has a compelling reason not to.
> > 
> > What's the problem with depending on Perl? It's a useful scripting language, 
> > used in a lot of packages, thus so many things require it that you'll be 
> > hard-pressed to find a working system without Perl, especially an X11-enabled 
> > one. For example, kdelibs requires Perl (it's used for things like 
> > kconf_update), so any KDE system will always have Perl anyway.
> 
> I'm not arguing against perl qua perl.  I am arguing against needless
> arcs in the dep graph.  This one package has a perl dependency solely
> because it provides a single perl script that no one is ever likely to
> use.
> 
> Sure, it's just one dep, but every dep counts.  The complexity of the
> graph directly affects runtime performance for rpm and yum, and the
> ability to use trimmed subsets of Fedora for custom purposes.  The graph
> is important.  We argue so much for correcness in initial packaging.  We
> should be correct at the system level too.

Rather than dropping bdftruncate entirely, perhaps simply put it in its
own subpackage? You wouldn't need it to Require anything (the perl deps
will be autogenerated), nor would xorg-x11-font-utils need to Require
the bdftruncate subpackage, effectively solving the problem without
dropping (semi) useful code.

%package -n bdftruncate
Summary: Generate truncated BDF font from ISO 10646-1 encoded BDF font
Group:	 Applications/System

%description -n bdftruncate
bdftruncate allows one to generate from an ISO10646-1 encoded BDF font
other ISO10646-1 BDF fonts in which all characters above a threshold
code value are stored unencoded. This is often desirable because the
Xlib API and X11 protocol data structures used for representing font
metric information are extremely inefficient when handling sparsely
populated fonts.

...

%files -n bdftruncate
%defattr(-,root,root,-)
%{_bindir}/bdftruncate
%{_mandir}/bdftruncate.*

~spot




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