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

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Mike A. Harris wrote:

> It'd be an interesting test for someone to disable xfs, and
> to configure the X server to have only the "misc" font dir
> as a configured font path in xorg.conf, and then see what
> all apps no longer work.

I've been running my X server with xfs disabled for over one
year, but I've added back core fonts in my xorg.conf.

This seems to be a good compromise that would keep all legacy
toolkits happy for a few more years.

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).

Today, this is largely useless because:

 - Very few apps use the core fonts
 - most of them are not even localized or unable to use non-western fonts
 - Today's CPUs are much faster
 - Unless I've misunderstood something, X should now be able
   to load and render single character glyphs at a time.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/