Font packages changes required for dropping chkfontpath/xfs

[Kristian Høgsberg]

Hi all,

As you may know, xfs and chkfontpath is going away for Fedora 8.
Basically xfs was always an unnecessary complication, that we pulled in
because chkfontpath gave us the ability to reconfigure xfs on the fly.
With the new fontpath.d change to libXfont, we can acheive the same
using symlinks in /etc/X11/fontpath.d and thus, we're getting rid of xfs
and chkfontpath.  More details here (including the description below):

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureNoMoreXFS

Third party font packages, if any, will need to drop their configuration
symlink in /etc/X11/fontpath.d rather than run chkfontpath. Note that
you only need to do this if you want the fonts to be available over the
old core font mechanism. If you're just doing client-side fonts (as both
gtk and qt do nowadays) then you can demolish the chkfontpath call
entirely. 

What I've done for the packages I've updates (the xorg-x11 font
packages) is to install the symlink in %install and just list it in the
%files section. For 3rd party core font RPMs I recommend using the
package name as the symlink name to avoid conflicts if you install the
fonts in a non-standard directory. For example, from the
ghostscript-fonts specfile: 

        %define fontdir %{_datadir}/fonts/default/ghostscript
        %define catalogue /etc/X11/fontpath.d
        ...
        
        %install
        ...
        # Install catalogue symlink                                                     
        mkdir -p $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{catalogue}
        ln -sf %{fontdir} $RPM_BUILD_ROOT%{catalogue}/ghostscript
        
        %files
        ...
        %dir %{catalogue}
        %{catalogue}/fonts-default
        
We're hoping to these changes before F8 goes out, so if you maintain a
font package that installs core fonts (i.e. it runs chkfontpath), your
help in getting these changes done is much appreciated.

thanks,
Kristian