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

[Adam Jackson]

Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Dimi Paun wrote:
>> On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 01:16 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>>> 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. 
>>
>> Great to hear we're moving in this direction.
>> I guess the obvious question is "what will break?". Once we
>> have a clear idea what really depends on xfs (some packages, like 
>> wine, _can_ work with xfs if it's the only available option, or 
>> without), we can devise a plan of making xfs optional (moved to Extra 
>> along with all apps that depend on it?).
> 
> No apps[1] require xfs.  Lots of apps require "core fonts"
> support.  We currently provide core fonts support via the
> xfs font server, however the X server is equally capable
> of serving fonts on its own without a separate font server.

I assume the [1] here was meant to point to a footnote about various 
very-low-level tools that do know how to explicitly talk to font 
servers.  It's not a large list: fslsfonts, fstobdf, mkcfm, showfont, 
and xfsinfo from the Xorg app collection, and probably zero outside of that.

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.

- ajax