Where should the modular X11R7 fonts get installed to?

[Mike A. Harris]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le dimanche 06 novembre 2005 à 11:28 -0500, Mike A. Harris a écrit :
> 
> 
>>Another possible problem, is that I'm not sure if fontconfig/Xft
>>support all of the font types that are supported by the core fonts
>>system.
> 
> 
> Well, I for one would appreciate if all the weirdo fonts were put in
> fonts-xorg-x11-legacy, and only a minimal set needed for server startup
> was installed by default.

That is an orthagonal issue, unrelated to this problem however.
It also creates a font installation granularity problem, where
if you want a single ISO8859-1 set installed, you get all of the
ISO8859-* fonts and anything else all in the one large package.

Many people want to install only the fonts that they will be using,
which is why our X font packaging puts each font type/encoding in
it's own subpackage.  I don't see any reason to stop doing this, at
least until the core fonts system is capable of on-the-fly transcoding
from the UCS masters.  At that point, we only need to ship the
UCS fonts, and that would reduce both the number of font packages,
and the number of disk wastage.

Again however, that is an orthagonal issue, of which I'm not too
concerned about right now.


> In fact if we could have a legacy-free default config it would be even
> better. The "can not find fixed" problems have been plaguing users which
> had absolutely no need for fixed in the first place for years.

It's not very "better" when someone goes to run an application and
their fonts are not installed, and they complain loudly on mailing
lists, and file oodles of bug reports with cursing and swearing in
them.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all in favour of deprecating old technology
and eventually removing it sometime down the road.  But if that causes
too large of an increase in user/customer support problems, bug reports,
support escalations, and hate mail, then I'm strongly opposed to it,
if I'm on the receiving end of it all.

How many people would be upset if we compiled the fixed and cursor font
directly into the X server, so you never see "Can't find font fixed"
again, and we did not install xfs by default, and did not install any
core fonts by default, and also left libXt and libXaw out of a default
OS install?  Yes, this means xterm wont work by default too.

I'm sure people would not be very impressed.  Heck, I still receive
angry email for removing xbiff.

Anyhow, back to the original problem...