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

[Mike A. Harris]

Mike Chambers wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-22 at 15:29 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
>> Once your desktop is started, open a terminal and run various
>> non-GNOME, non-GTK2, non-KDE, non-Qt applications.  For example,
>> run Xt, Xaw, Motif, and other such apps, and see if they work
>> properly, or if they fail miserably.  If any apps fail and
>> report an error about a missing font or other font related
>> problem, make note of it.
> 
> nedit works fine but has this below when started...
> 
> [mike at scrappy ~]$ nedit xorg.conf
> nedit: the current locale is utf8 (en_US.UTF-8)
> nedit: changed locale to non-utf8 (en_US)
> Cannot convert string
> "-*-helvetica-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type
> FontStruct
> Cannot convert string
> "-*-helvetica-bold-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct
> Cannot convert string
> "-*-helvetica-medium-o-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type
> FontStruct
> Cannot convert string
> "-*-courier-medium-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct
> Cannot convert string "-*-courier-bold-r-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1"
> to type FontStruct
> Cannot convert string
> "-*-courier-medium-o-normal-*-*-120-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct

That indicates that nedit uses core fonts, and is trying to use
helvetica, which is not configured in the core fonts system.  If nedit
still works, it is probably falling back to another font.


> And emacs does NOT work.  The menu is readable and the icon shapes are
> fine, but the wording is just boxes.  Also the letters in the files
> themselves when trying to edit with emacs is just boxes.

I figured emacs would be the killer. ;)


> [mike at scrappy ~]$ emacs
> Warning: Cannot convert string
> "-*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*" to type FontStruct
> Warning: Cannot convert string
> "-*-helvetica-medium-r-*--*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" to type FontStruct
 >
> Evolution, firefox, epiphany, xchat, gnome-terminal all seem to work, as
> well as most of the other gnome/desktop apps in a general workstation
> install.  Will have to see about testing some more.

All GNOME/KDE apps which use GTK2, will work because they are not using
core fonts, they're using fontconfig/Xft2.  They're expected to work
fine.  It is the Xaw/Xt/Motif and other apps that are expected to be
using core fonts, which might fail or look ugly.

I think if enough people perform the test you've just done, and run
_all_ of the applications that they use on a day to day basis, and
indicate which ones fail miserably, or otherwise look horrible, the
list of "missing fonts" that we need to add back to a default core
fonts configuration for the system to work out of the box without
major hassles will grow to essentially become what we have right now,
or at least be large enough to be the same thing more or less.

I'm wondering if it might be a better idea to simply replace the xfs
dependency in the X server packaging with a virtual:

Requires: fixed-font
Requires: cursor-font

And make a separate package containing those for OLPC.  Then OLPC
installs needn't depend on xfs, but Fedora and RHEL can simply continue
to use it by default.  It would require changing some of the font
rpms still of course though, as they invoke chkfontpath currently,
which has a dep on xfs.  But OLPC has stated that they do not want
any of the core fonts font packages installed, so we would only have
to modify the font rpms that are intended to be installed on OLPC
systems, to no longer configure themselves to integrate into the
xfs configuration.  I think that'd be a reasonable approach at least
in theory.

Feedback appreciated.




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