Fedora 11 font package changes proposal (renames, splits, etc)

[Behdad Esfahbod]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le lundi 10 novembre 2008 à 12:10 -0500, Bill Nottingham a écrit :
>> Nicolas Mailhot (nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net) said: 
>>> ▶ package splits, to offer more flexibility to spin groups and fedora
>>> users
>> ...
>>> ▶ help spins and users
>>>
>>> Wanting serif from dejavu, mono from liberation, and sans from tiresias,
>>> without dragging in all the other dejavu/liberation/tiresias fonts is a
>>> valid setup.
>> This sounds like severe overkill. If they want different scripts, why
>> not just adjust their fontconfig configuration? Realistically, I can't
>> think of an example where we'd want to ship dejavu for one script but
>> not another. Do you have one?

I have to agree with Bill here.  It's overkill.  Also note that, the more font
packages we have, means the more font directories we have (unless we stuff
fonts from different packages in the same dir), which means more work to do at
each application startup (we mmap() one cache file per font dir).  On my
system any application mmap's 150 cache files right now.  Don't make that 150.
    The cost is nonnegligible;  on the order of 1ms per cache file.

behdad

> Actually dejavu is a bad example because everyone wants it. I only did
> it because it's a complex and complete package that could stress the
> macros (also because it's my main package).
> 
> But for the other font packages, it's very common to want only one font
> in a collection (for example all our artists use one mgopen font but not
> the others, we only need one font installed by default for each script
> to support it in the default install, etc).
> 
> Also that makes dynamic font installation possible: when a document or
> web page references a font you can just install the corresponding
> package and not drag megs of unrelated fonts that just happened to be
> released by the same entity.
> 
>