X in FC7

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2006-11-13 at 08:17 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> Jesse Barnes wrote:
> 
> > Well, I created an account but can't seem to edit the page.  Anyway, I 
> > like the idea of getting rid of xfs, it seems fairly useless.  And to 
> > quote mharris from awhile back:
> > 
> >> Long term, what would be really nice, is if someone figured
> >> out a way to implement core fonts using fontconfig/Xft
> >> underneath so we have one font system, and it provides
> >> legacy compatibility to ancient applications that have not
> >> been updated to modern interfaces.  That is something that
> >> would need to be spearheaded at the X.Org level rather than
> >> at a specific distribution however.
> 
> So here's where I start to admit some font ignorance, but.  I took a 
> hack at this a while back, and it seemed to me like using fontconfig for 
> matching was the wrong idea, since the properties available from 
> fontconfig didn't quite match what you can select on with XLFD.
> 
> As said on the wiki page, what problem is xfs trying to solve?  If it's 
> just about the ability to add fonts at runtime without having to do 
> 'xset fp rehash', then that should be a very small amount of code to add 
> to the X server.  You need to watch for directories popping in and out 
> of existance, but, okay, we know how to do that.

There's basically one reason why we switched to xfs years ago ...
performance with large fonts; if you don't use xfs, then trying to
load a large core font (for CHJK) can block all requests to the server
for several seconds. Well, it could on machines of that day.

Since core fonts are really fringe at this point, the main concern with
a switch back to using in-server fonts would be configuration ... do you
really want to change complicated %post scripts for a bunch of packages
to do something new and different?

That would be the possible advantage of a switch to locating fonts
via fontconfig... there wouldn't be something new to add to the font
packages.

On the other there fair bit of new engineering and it also raises
the question of what do you do to keep your set of core fonts and
fontconfig font distinct? ... you don't want all the Adobe Helvetica
bitmaps infecting your nice scalable fonts, and you don't want 
Indic/Arabic/etc fonts to show up when listing core fonts since they
are useless within the core font system.

					- Owen