Identifying remaining core font users

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 13:11 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> It has been plain since 2003¹ our new font access standard would be
> fontconfig. Since then most users of the old core fonts X11 backend have
> migrated, but there are still a few stragglers.
> 
> Unfortunately these stragglers matter. Core fonts were not good in 2003,
> and they didn't get any better since. Few users means life-support
> maintenance only, no one to replace/fix core fonts when a technical or
> legal problem causes them to be dropped, no one to update them when
> encoding standards change. Also, few users means we do not install core
> font packages by default anymore, so packagers that depend on them but
> forgot to mark the deps in their packages will deliver broken packages
> to users.
> 
> Every remaining core font user is therefore likely to hit more and more
> problems as time passes. Each of those problems produces as a side
> effect "Fedora fonts suck" messages on the Internet, messages that
> detract on all the terrific work Fedora people do on our main font
> backend (and associated fonts). End-users are not educated enough to
> recognize the root of their problems is the use of a deprecated
> almost-no-maintained tech (and they should not have to bother about it).
> 
> Therefore, I'd like to identify remaining core font users, and remind
> them periodically their core font use is not good for their users or for
> Fedora.
> 
> Since there is not question of deliberately removing core fonts
> infrastructure from Fedora, I need to whitelist first the few files used
> to maintain this infrastructure (xfontsel and xlsfonts are such files;
> twm and gtk1 — not). I'd therefore be grateful if people checked the
> following list and pointed to me files that need to be removed for this
> reason.
> 
> Please answer this message with statements such as "file foo can be
> removed from the list because it is used this way to manage the core
> fonts backend or to propagate the core font protocol to X11 clients".
> 
> Again, widget libraries or utilities that made use of the core fonts
> backend when it was the font access standard, do not count. Also modern
> libraries that have some form of vestigial core fonts code hidden deep
> inside them should probably just excise it (this use it probably worse
> than apps that only use core fonts , since those apps at least test
> regularly if their core fonts use is not totally broken).

> • icewm icewm-0:1.2.37-5.fc12
>   — /usr/bin/icehelp
>   — /usr/bin/icesh
>   — /usr/bin/icewm-session
>   — /usr/bin/icewmbg
>   — /usr/bin/icewmtray
>   — /usr/bin/icewm
> • idesk idesk-0:0.7.5-9.fc12
>   — /usr/bin/idesk

I own both icewm and idesk.
As far as I know, both icewm and idesk are linked against xft and should
not default to core fonts. (Unless I completely misunderstanding
something...)

- Gilboa