RFC: Making the xfs font server optional in Fedora Core and its derivatives.

[Mike A. Harris]

Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Mike A. Harris (mharris at mharris.ca) said: 
>>> IIRC, delegating font rendering to xfs was just a workaround
>>> to avoid hanging X for too long while loading fonts with lots
>>> of glyphs (e.g. kanji fonts).
>> That was more or less one of the primary reasons, however several
>> people for years now claim that it is no longer a real issue.
> 
> I believe one of the other reasons was that adding it to the
> server's path at runtime was somewhat of a PITA (moreover, 
> it required mucking directly with the server config file.)

xset can add/remove font paths at runtime no prob.  The future
of the X server seems to be heading towards having no config
file, and instead having sane builtin defaults, and runtime
configuration of some sort.

In theory, the X server could have a built in font path that
points to fixed+misc (or have them compiled into the binary),
and rely on xset invoked from startup scripts to add
additional font paths.

xset is capable of adding font servers to the font path if
desired as well, which comes in handy when xfs crashes or has
to be shut down and restarted.  Adding it back to the font
path at runtime allows one to avoid having to restart the
X server.

If we were to go to a setup like this, the xinitrc package
would have to be updated (probably xinitrc-common) to invoke
xset for adding font paths, and we'd need a new config file
somewhere to store the fontpath configuration.

Any thoughts about this approach?

-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.