[RFC] Better font filetype and metadata file detection for xfs initscript

[Mike A. Harris]

On Thu, 9 Oct 2003, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>> I definitely would like to hear other people's opinions on all of 
>> these matters though...  I will probably agree with most 
>> suggestions.   ;o)  I wont necessarily be able to implement or 
>> control all font related suggestions though, but I can try to 
>> help influence decisions for any good ideas people come up with.  
>> ;o)
>
>My opinion is simple. We need more font setup coordination. I don't care
>if it's done via macros, an official document, or a reference spec file
>everyone is supposed to copy (like bitstream-vera was going to be in
>fedora.us before the merge), but I'm dead tired of not having two font
>package behaving the same way because they all use their own secret
>recipes.

So am I, but any time something changes, I can't contact n random
developers and tell them what chagnes to incorporate into their
packages very easily, and if I make a document and put it
somewhere, I have no guarantee anyone will read it.  I've direct
emailed people about changes in the past and was ignored.  I
don't recall if I bugzilla'd my requests or not however so that
may be my fault perhaps.  I'd still prefer to just maintain all
the font packages in the distribution myself and make them all
follow one style and one common set of installation mechanics.

There is also a problem where all fonts could theoretically be 
used by both xfs and also fontconfig/Xft, however we only want 
the given fonts to be in one or the other of those 2 systems for 
whatever preferential reasons we have.  One example is the Luxi 
TTF font.  Last I checked, we only enable this in core fonts and 
not in fontconfig, because the Luxi Type1 font is nicer looking 
in fontconfig than Luxi TTF.

Having a single definitive "install-font" script which could be 
used in all packages would be nice, however it would have to also 
have commandline options to allow "core fonts only" and 
"fontconfig only" options, and perhaps others.  I haven't had the 
time to investigate doing such though.

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat