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

[Adam Jackson]

Mike A. Harris wrote:
>> I'm of the opinion that leaving xfs enabled isn't really a big deal 
>> even in RHEL, and that the correct fix is to fix the X server to use 
>> fontconfig once and for all, rather than expose users to a needless 
>> configuration change.  I don't see the intermediate steps as being 
>> worthwhile targets on their own.
> 
> Replacing the core fonts system with a compatibility layer that is
> implemented on top of Xft/fontconfig is indeed the best long term
> solution IMHO.  Unfortunately, such solution does not exist at this
> point in time, and is equally unlikely to exist in time for FC6 and
> RHEL5 as far as I can determine.  So we need a solution for OLPC,
> FC6, RHEL5 which can be ready probably before test2 in order to
> have time to work out any kinks.
> 
> The question then becomes:
> 
> Do the OLPC people require a solution right now, or can they wait until
> some yet unnamed person writes a core fonts compatibility layer that
> sits on top of fontconfig/Xft?

Are we really requiring FC6 and OLPC to be built from the same image, or 
do we get a flag for it at build time?  If the latter, then it'd be 
really easy to do:

%if %{olpc}
Patch666: always-inject-misc-into-font-path.patch
%endif

Which would take me roughly five minutes to write and another ten to 
build.  Obviously this wouldn't be quite so pleasant for Fedora, since 
it turns the failure mode from fatal to mysterious runtime weirdness; I 
think that's a separate issue and I just need to learn fontconfig already.

- ajax