[Bug 921706] ghostscript: /invalidfont in /findfont, --nostringval-- Helvetica

[Red Hat Bugzilla]

Product: Fedora
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=921706

Jerry James  changed:

What    |Removed                     |Added
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--- Comment #11 from Jerry James  ---
I just tracked a cvc4 build error down to this bug (although it is
"Times-Roman" this time, instead of "Helvetica".)  There seems to be a race
condition somewhere, as I sometimes get good builds in mock, and sometimes get
this failure.  I've kept one good and one bad mock buildroot around for
comparison.  Here is what I know:

1. The installed packages are identical in the two cases: same versions, etc.
2. On the successful builds, ghostscript reads the urw-fonts files and does its
work.  On the failed builds, ghostscript never reads any urw-fonts file.
3. On the failed builds, at the step where the good builds read a urw-fonts
file, the failed build instead tries (and fails) to find files named
NimbusRomNo9L-Regu and NimbusMonL-Regu.  It looks all over the filesystem for
those 2 files before throwing an /invalidfont error.
4. The contents of /usr/share/fontconfig, /usr/share/fonts, and /etc/fonts are
identical in the two cases.
5. The string "/usr/share/fonts/default/Type1" appears in 2 files in
/var/cache/fontconfig in the successful build, but appears in 0 files in the
failed build.

Which leads me to suspect that something in the urw-fonts %post script can fail
sometimes, but since it is written like this:

{
   umask 133
   mkfontscale /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 || :
   `which mkfontdir` /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 || :
   fc-cache /usr/share/fonts
} &> /dev/null || :

any such failure is sent to /dev/null, and doesn't cause RPM to complain, so I
have no way of knowing.  As a test, I reran each of those commands by hand in
the failed buildroot, removed the contents of /var/cache/fontconfig, and reran
the fig2dev command.  It worked then.