Where should the modular X11R7 fonts get installed to?

[Mike A. Harris]

Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Sunday, November 06, 2005 8:28 am, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
>>I believe Owen, or whoever set up our default fonts.conf
>>configuration, intentionally selected only the above specific
>>/usr/X11R6 font directories, in order to pick up the scaleable Type1
>>and OTF fonts that come with X, intentionally excluding all of the
>>ugly bitmap fonts and other weirdo fonts from being seen by
>>fontconfig.
> 
> 
> But don't you *want* to see all your fonts?  I.e. if you chose to 
> install xorg-ugly-fonts, you don't want them mysteriously missing from 
> your font listings, do you?

There are 2 individual font subsystems in X:

1) server side "core fonts" via xfs or the X server
2) client side fonts via fontconfig/Xft

These two font systems are independent of each other, and individually
configured.

The "core fonts" system is for legacy X applications, in particular
applications that use the Xt, Xaw, and Motif toolkits, as well as other
legacy toolkits.

The majority of the fonts supplied by the X Window system are hideous
bitmap fonts, of which many of these "legacy" applications rely on being
installed and available.  Many legacy X applications hard code specific
fonts as well, and wont even start if the font is not available.  It is
for this reason, which many of the fonts are still supplied - more or
less for legacy compatibility.

However, while many of these "hideous" fonts are required for legacy
compatibility purposes with the core fonts subsystem, they are not
required by the modern fontconfig/Xft subsystem which modern
applications and GUI toolkits use.

It is intentional, that the "ugly" X fonts supplied for legacy
compatibility are installed and only configured to be used in the
"core" fonts subsystem.  They are intentionally excluded from being
visible from the fontconfig subsystem.

Users are of course free to edit /etc/fonts/local.conf and configure
fontconfig to use all of the ugly bitmap fonts supplied by X, however
I can assure everyone that the results are greatly undesireable.

You do have that option however, but it definitely wont be the
default in Fedora Core.

> I think as long as the ugly fonts are in separate packages, putting them 
> all in /usr/share/fonts will be ok based on the principle of least 
> surprise (though you bring up a good point that this is a change in 
> behavior wrt current FC).

Except that there are 2 font systems in the system used by X
applications, and there are fonts we only want visible to one
of those 2 systems.  fontconfig sees all fonts under
/usr/share/fonts unless you reconfigure fontconfig to blacklist
unwanted fonts.

I believe it is safe to say that the majority of fonts supplied by
X, can be considered to be fonts intended for use by X core fonts
only, rather than for general purpose use that /usr/share/fonts
is intended for.  In other words, they can be considered application
specific data IMHO.

The new xorg-x11-fonts package installs all of the fonts into
/usr/share/X11/fonts currently, however this location is not
finalized yet.

Also, I want to avoid xfs config file skew, as that causes a lot of
mayhem on upgrades.  We need to rip out old paths that are no longer
used.

I'll be providing updates on the Xorg modularization status page
soon:  http://mharris.ca/xorg-modular/xorg-modularization.html