Packagekit font autoinstall [was Re: Some packagekit feedback]

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le dimanche 13 avril 2008 à 19:39 +0100, Richard Hughes a écrit :
>  On Sun, 2008-04-13 at 14:17 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:  
>  > — help users install the right fonts on their system:
>  >   — when a user encounters some script (in its browser, office
>  > suite, etc) the system can not render due to lack of fonts the
>  > application used could propose installing the needed font packages
>  > (probably needs work with Behdad to write an helper that auto-adds the
>  > needed Provides to font packages at build time)
>  
>  Sure, we can install them trivially. See
>  http://hughsient.livejournal.com/55964.html 
It's not trivial because current packages do not have the necessary
metadata. And the install-fonts-by-style is yet another thing. But since
this metadata would be pretty useless for humans and only makes sense in
a packagekit-like context, you have a chicken and egg problem.

>  > This is something that would help a huge number of users, much
> more than
>  > codec plugins ever will. It would probably justify the whole packagekit
>  > infrastructure alone.
>  
>  Okay, lets make this happen. Could you join the packagekit mailing list
>  and we'll discuss there how it can be done. I think it's perfectly in
>  the scope of packagekit, although we don't want to re-implement this in
>  every application that wants to use pango. 
Actually, it's every application that uses fontconfig (Behdad is also
Fedora's fontconfig man). Which is a huge application base, so you'd
need a big generic part and a small application-specific glue.

>  If you cc Behdad we can all
>  talk on the same hymn sheet. 
CC done


-- 
Nicolas Mailhot