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

[Michael Tiemann]

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 01:16 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:

> In particular, xfs and core fonts does not fit well into the
> One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort, or other Fedora derived
> embedded distributions.  In these embedded systems, or
> reduced computing environments if you will, every megabyte
> of disk space and memory counts.  Shedding megs of stuff out
> of the default OS installation is sure to reduce both the
> memory footprint and disk footprint of the OS installation,
> which is a net gain for these systems, and also for a lot
> of the userbase out there that do not use any applications
> which rely on core fonts.
> 
> On the other hand, there are many applications included both
> in Fedora Core, and in Fedora Extras, which do rely on the
> core fonts system still, and are likely to rely on it for the
> forseeable future.  There are also many 3rd party open source
> and commercial applications, as well as custom in-house
> applications that many users and/or companies rely on, and
> will want to keep working in new OS releases.

Is it too late for this to be a major thrust of the Fedora Summer of
Code projects?  Even if it is, I think that such changes create a
tremendous amount of opportunity for new folks to step into new
leadership roles.  I can imagine that at next years OSCON there will be
a new crop of hackers who can proudly say "I cleaned up the font cruft
in Project XYZ and now maintain its use of the new font system".

I also think that given all the stuff that's been going on in Fedora in
support of server-side computing, it makes good sense to give some major
priority (which can mean major leeway) to client-side computing.

M