Mike A. Harris wrote:
Dimi Paun wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 01:16 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>> On the other hand, there are many applications included both
>> in Fedora Core, and in Fedora Extras, which do rely on the
>> core fonts system still, and are likely to rely on it for the
>> forseeable future.
>
> Great to hear we're moving in this direction.
> I guess the obvious question is "what will break?". Once we
> have a clear idea what really depends on xfs (some packages, like
> wine, _can_ work with xfs if it's the only available option, or
> without), we can devise a plan of making xfs optional (moved to Extra
> along with all apps that depend on it?).
No apps[1] require xfs. Lots of apps require "core fonts"
support. We currently provide core fonts support via the
xfs font server, however the X server is equally capable
of serving fonts on its own without a separate font server.
I assume the [1] here was meant to point to a footnote about various
very-low-level tools that do know how to explicitly talk to font
servers. It's not a large list: fslsfonts, fstobdf, mkcfm, showfont,
and xfsinfo from the Xorg app collection, and probably zero outside of that.
I'm of the opinion that leaving xfs enabled isn't really a big deal even
in RHEL, and that the correct fix is to fix the X server to use
fontconfig once and for all, rather than expose users to a needless
configuration change. I don't see the intermediate steps as being
worthwhile targets on their own.
- ajax