[Fwd: Font issues (mkfontdir & friends not getting run) with F-8]

[Hans de Goede]

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-11-17 at 08:36 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> [snip] 
>>> Fontconfig doesn't store cache files in the directory anymore.  They go
>>> in /var/cache/fontconfig.  That's been the case for a while.
>> Ah, then the packages also should no longer ghost fc-cache in the fonts dir.
> 
> No, they shouldn't.
> 

[hans at localhost ~]$ rpm -ql urw-fonts
urw-fonts-2.4-1.fc8.noarch
/etc/X11/fontpath.d/fonts-default
/usr/share/doc/urw-fonts-2.4
/usr/share/doc/urw-fonts-2.4/COPYING
/usr/share/doc/urw-fonts-2.4/README
/usr/share/doc/urw-fonts-2.4/README.tweaks
/usr/share/fonts/default
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/a010013l.afm
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/a010013l.pfb
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/a010015l.afm
<snip>
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/d050000l.pfb
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/encodings.dir
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/fonts.cache-1
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/fonts.dir
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/fonts.scale
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n019003l.afm
/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/n019003l.pfb
<snip>

Well atleast urw-fonts still does. I know bugzilla, but I would first
rather see some solution for the fonts.scale and fonts.dir files too,
before checking all font packages and filing bugs.

>>>> As for the other two not being created, well that is to be expected if the 
>>>> necessary packages are not added to any Requires.
>>>>
>>>> Why are these files generated on install anyways, I understand this used to be 
>>>> usefull back in the days when multiple packages would install files under one 
>>>> dir, but isn't it so that most font dirs now only contain fonts from one package?
>>> I don't understand.  When are you suggesting they should be generated? 
>> At package buildtime, and then simply include them in the package 
>> instead of %ghost them and generate them with scriptlets.
> 
> Interesting.  Never thought about it like that.  However, there are a
> few reason why that's not going to work:
> 
>   - fc-cache (and similar tools I assume) don't handle DESTDIR.  You
> sure can force them to do it, but it needs considerable effort on the
> packagers side.
> 
>   - fontconfig cache format/version changes over time.  Mostly in a
> compatible way, but still making old caches useless.  This happened with
> the recent 2.5 for example.
> 
>   - Kind of rewording of the previous item:  We're trying to make font
> packages not depend on fontconfig.  Would be kinda weird to install a
> fontconfig cache file without checking fontconfig version.
> 
> I don't think cache updates are hassle enough to try to fix them right
> now.
>

Sorry, the above are all very valid, but I didn't mean the fontconfig
files, I meant the fonts.scale and fonts.dir files.


> Obsolete core-protocol fonts are out of my expertise/interest so I leave
> that to others.
> 

Too bad, as that is the real problem, urw-fonts (for example) requires
fontconfig, so the scriptlets for updating the fontconfig cache should
work, however the scriptlets for generating fonts.dir and fonts.scale
needed by older apps (like xfig, which I co-maintain now and resolving
an xfig bug got me to investigate this) do not have the necessary
requires an therefor don't work, for example on the F8 i386 live CD
there only is a fonts.scale and not a fonts.dir for urw-fonts causing
xfig (and other) breakage.

Now I can go and file a bug against urw-fonts, but for example
ghostscript-fonts has exact the same problem. So I'm trying to find /
discuss a solution here on the list instead of filing bugs and having to
discuss this separately for every package.

So are there any reasons not to generate fonts.scale and fonts.dir (and
I guess also encodings.dir) at build time and include them in the font
package?

This assumes all font files in a dir come from one package, because this
clearly wont work if multiple packages install fonts into the same dir.
Are there any known cases of multiple font packages installing fonts
into the same dir in current Fedora?

Regards,

Hans