X in FC7

[Adam Jackson]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 08:17 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
>> Jesse Barnes wrote:
>>
>>> Well, I created an account but can't seem to edit the page.  Anyway, I 
>>> like the idea of getting rid of xfs, it seems fairly useless.  And to 
>>> quote mharris from awhile back:
>>>
>>>> Long term, what would be really nice, is if someone figured
>>>> out a way to implement core fonts using fontconfig/Xft
>>>> underneath so we have one font system, and it provides
>>>> legacy compatibility to ancient applications that have not
>>>> been updated to modern interfaces.  That is something that
>>>> would need to be spearheaded at the X.Org level rather than
>>>> at a specific distribution however.
>> So here's where I start to admit some font ignorance, but.  I took a 
>> hack at this a while back, and it seemed to me like using fontconfig for 
>> matching was the wrong idea, since the properties available from 
>> fontconfig didn't quite match what you can select on with XLFD.
>>
>> 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.
> 
> There's basically one reason why we switched to xfs years ago ...
> performance with large fonts; if you don't use xfs, then trying to
> load a large core font (for CHJK) can block all requests to the server
> for several seconds. Well, it could on machines of that day.
> 
> Since core fonts are really fringe at this point, the main concern with
> a switch back to using in-server fonts would be configuration ... do you
> really want to change complicated %post scripts for a bunch of packages
> to do something new and different?

Would you even have to though?

It looks like %post for the core subpackages of xorg-x11-fonts is just 
doing chkfontpath/mkfontscale/mkfontdir for the core stuff, and then 
fc-cache for fontconfig visibility.  Okay, fine, you might have added a 
directory, great.  The server (in the new world order) would just check 
directory mtimes at font open time and automatically rehash and so 
forth, so you're doing _more_ work than you need to at install time.  Right?

In which case, "fixing" font packages is a matter of requiring a 
sufficiently new server and deleting %post.  I am totally okay with fix 
by deletion.

- ajax