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

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Derek P. Moore wrote:

>>                 ttmkfdir -d . -o fonts.scale
>
>Doesn't 'mkfontscale' replace 'ttmkfdir'?

"Theoretically" speaking, yes.  Technically speaking however,
mkfontscale and ttmkfdir output different results for fonts.scale
because mkfontscale does not support Asian fonts well, in
particular it doesn't handle .ttc fonts if I recall correctly.  
There were a few reasons such as this, which is why we kept
ttmkfdir instead of migrating to mkfontscale, however we provide 
both.  Up until now, I don't think any of our scripts use 
mkfontscale though, however I'm planning on using it for opentype 
fonts now as ttmkfdir doesn't handle opentype.


>While you're updatin' this initscript, might you want to update
>it to use 'mkfontscale'?  (In which case, 'mkfontscale
>&>/dev/null' would suffice; though, to follow the style of the
>'mkfontdir' statements, 'mkfontscale . &>/dev/null' will also do
>[even though the '.' is redundant with both 'mkfontdir' and
>'mkfontscale' commands]).

Just did that for opentype fonts.  I'm going to post my latest 
patch here for review, with a few more enhancements.

>P.S.:  I'm glad to see work in this area.  I have all the Adobe
>Font Folio fonts on my Linux box, and a specific subset of the
>Postscript fonts (installed [or, rather, symlinked] under
>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1) consistently disappear when, I
>think, I 'rpm -Fvh XFree86*'.  I haven't really bothered too
>hard to trace down what exactly is causing it, because
>'mkfontdir /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 && mkfontscale
>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1' fixes it (and then I instantly
>become unmotivated to bug-hunt).

Yes, this is unfortunate, because we ship hard coded fonts.dir 
files IIRC for Type1 fonts rather than installation time and boot 
time regenerating them like we do via xfs initscript and rpm 
postinstall scripts.  This historically is because there was no 
application for generating the files shipped with XFree86.  There 
was type1inst however that was never shipped with the distro or 
XFree86 for some reason I'm unaware of, and I never had time to 
really investigate it.  mkfontscale should handle Type1 fonts now 
however, and I may want to add support to the xfs initscript and 
various font packages for using mkfontscale with all Type1 fonts.

Owen:  Have you played with mkfontscale and Type1 fonts at all by 
any chance?  It's too late in the Fedora development cycle to 
consider making changes like this for this release, however it 
would be an improvment for users for Fedora Core 2 IMHO if we 
were to use mkfontscale on all Type1 font directories and 
packages in the future.

Any feedback appreciated.



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