Fedora Weekly News Issue 111, Core Fonts Issues

[John Summerfield]

I emphasise, don't reply to me off-list, unless you're at one of the few 
locations allowed to mail to my domain, it will bounce.

Thomas, I'm not a developer and don't want to be one, or join any 
developer list. From comments you attribute to Hans, i guess he might be 
interested in persuing my point.

Thomas Chung wrote:

> === Core Fonts Issues ===
> 
> An apparently slowly smoldering dispute over the treatment of older
> "core fonts" flamed up in a couple a of places. This is linked in to
> the larger dispute over the review queue and governance issues raised
> within (see this same FWN#111 "Review Queue Cont.")
> 
> Nicolas forwarded[1] an email from @fedora-fonts from HansdeGoede
> which was about the failure of post-install scriptlets to run for core
> fonts rpms.  Hans wondered why the files were generated this way
> instead of being pre-generated and shipped in the package. Nicolas
> noted that the packages which Hans was talking about followed the
> provisional fontconfig guidelines and that he himself did not care
> about the core font side of things. Due to the split nature of the
> discussion over the two lists, it is a bit confusing trying to follow
> the flow of the conversation, but it seems that BehdadEsfahbod
> provided the information that fontconfig had not stored cache files in
> /usr/share/fonts for some time, using /var/cache/fontconfig instead.

this may be a general problem, of which this is one instance. I've seen 
KDE configuration files in /usr:
06:29 [summer at numbat ~]$ ls -l /usr/share/config/kdm/*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 3610 Nov 11  2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xaccess
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root  194 Nov 12  2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xreset
-rw-r--r-- 1 root  481 Nov 11  2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xservers
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root  938 Nov 11  2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xsetup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root  192 Nov 12  2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xstartup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root  303 Nov 11  2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xwilling
-rw-r--r-- 1 root  350 Nov 25 07:16 /usr/share/config/kdm/backgroundrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1860 Nov 25 07:52 /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc


there is a serious problem here. Under FHS, /usr and /var can be 
different filesystems, with the first having the distiction that it can 
be mounted ro, and it can be shared between different systems.

Users on IBM mainframes have in fact been sharing /usr for years, 
between the (hundreds of) virtual Linux guests they run on their zSeries 
mainframes. They generally don't run GUIs though, so the fonts don't 
matter a lot.

However, with the advent of virtualisation for the masses with the 
introduction of Xen, it's not going to be very long before users realise 
the merits of sharing /usr at a potential saving of around 7 Gbytes for 
the each clone:
17:44 [summer at numbat ~]$ du -sh /usr/
du: `/usr/lib/audit': Permission denied
du: `/usr/libexec/utempter': Permission denied
6.7G    /usr/
06:18 [summer at numbat ~]$

They might clone /var, but they won't be sharing it, and so the fonts 
cache contains information about the fonts that are installed, it will 
become out of date as maintenance is done.

If it can be prebuilt, that's what should happen; if it can't be built 
at package-build time, then /usr is still the right filesystem.

The only possible alternative is /etc, but that's for per-host 
configuration. Its one advantage over var that I can think of is that 
people expect to have to keep an eye on /etc.



> Behdad also wondered where Hans thought the files should be generated,
> to which Hans replied[2] that this should be done at buildtime instead
> of generating them with scriplets. Hans demonstrated[3] that
> ''urw-fonts'' and ''ghostscript-fonts'' had a problem because they did
> not generate the ''fonts.dir'' and ''fonts.scale'' expected by older
> applications such as ''xfig''. Hans suggested that some guidelines on
> handling the core fonts were necessary and suggested two options, his
> preferred one being to generate fonts.dir and fonts.scale at
> buildtime.

Very sane. /usr is a sensible place to catalogue what's in /usr.


-- 

Cheers
John

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