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

[Mike A. Harris]

David Zeuthen wrote:
> 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.
> 
> Just to be perfectly clear: All we are asking right now from OLPC is to
> cut a few Requires here and there such that our RPM transaction (that
> include xorg-x11-server-Xorg) doesn't pull in xorg-x11-xfs. This will
> not break new installs nor upgrades of Fedora - for new installs, just
> make sure that the comps.xml files include xorg-x11-xfs in addition to
> xorg-x11-server-Xorg.
> 
> I second that it would be nice to get rid of xfs entirely but we're not
> really asking that much right now.

Yep, I understand that part, but the X server isn't the only thing
that drags in xfs.  chkfontpath drags in xfs, as chkfontpath has
to modify the xfs configuration.  Every font rpm in the distro
that currently configures itself to work with xfs by invoking
chkfontpath, has an indirect dependency on xfs.

Do you have a list of all of the font rpms that are intended to be
installed on an OLPC system?  If so, we can examine them all to
determine wether or not we can simply remove their chkfontpath
invocation.

If we can do that, as far as I know, we can remove all deps on
xfs from the packaging that gets used on OLPC, without killing
xfs usage by default for Fedora/RHEL.

That would potentially allow the whole "to xfs or not, that is the
question" discussion for 2008 or so. ;)

TIA


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