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

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mercredi 24 mai 2006 à 20:16 -0400, Mike A. Harris a écrit :

> When you see the "can't find font fixed" error, it is a clear sign right
> now that either xfs isn't running, or xfs is misconfigured, or one or
> more core font directories is misconfigured or improperly prepped.
> 
> IMHO, replacing that problem, with an X server that starts up ok,
> but where the core fonts system may still be misconfigured or otherwise
> unuseable by one or more apps, simply changes the problem to be a
> random app failure the user can't easily diagnose - causing them to
> flood bugzilla with various "my app starts with boxes instead of
> letters" problems, or worse, they click on an icon on their working
> desktop, and the app never starts at all - so they file a bug report
> against that application.
> 
> At least with the current failure mode, the person has to fix the
> font subsystem configuration problem before they can even start the
> server, and once they do fix that - they are unlikely to see individual
> applications failing miserably for no visible reason.

Do you know how ridiculous this reason is nowadays ?
How many people are able to "fix" the system in console mode ?
You don't hear people hitting the fixed problem because they just dump
Linux and forget about it - you've escalated a small problem to
catastrophic level. (let me remind you that people most needing core
font in FC are emacs users, emacs haven't moved to fontconfig yet
because its users are "real men" which do not need aa, unicode and
more-than-ascii support so these real men can edit config files and fix
their xfs even if the X server started gracefully for everyone else)

Nowadays a lot more apps use sound than core fonts - would you like it
if the alsa maintainer dumped users to the CLI when alsa is
misconfigured ? Just so he can force people to fix their config
themselves instead of entering bugs ?

Proposal : build in xorg a single ascii (127 char) 75 dpi fixed font,
and alias it to the common used names (to comply with the letter of the
spec). Have core font users install/configure anything more complex. 

Twist 1 : add a fail-if-no-xfs param in /etc, have xorg startup barf if
this is set and xfs is dead, and have the emacs rpm scriplets set this
param to true (and set it to false for the rest of the FC users)

Twist 2 : build emacs or xemacs with one of the experimental fontconfig
patches floating around, push it to rawhide and use the time to the next
release to stabilise it

I know I'm the devil's advocate here, but someone has to be

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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