Linux and application installing

[Petr Pisar]

On 2010-09-08, drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 7:59 PM, drago01 <drago01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Well ideally every app that allows font selection should have a button
>> / option "add new font" that opens a font installation dialog.
>
> To be clear this dialog should not be re implemented by every
> application but being an app started by said applications.

Well, a lot of toolkits uses fontconfig to dispatch font characteristics
to font file and some of them pango to substitute missing glyphs.

One could add a hook into fontconfig library. However I predict strong
opposition in upstream as fontconfig does not need X11 at all:

$ ldd /usr/lib64/libfontconfig.so
    linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x00007fffa1784000)
    libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libfreetype.so.6 (0x00000035d7a00000)
    libexpat.so.1 => /lib64/libexpat.so.1 (0x00000035d6a00000)
    libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00000035d0a00000)
    /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00000035d0600000)

Maybe some optional dbus code could be included to broadcast request for
missing font. If user had running an appropriate listener (some sort of
packagekit or font selector), he could get an systray alert or popup
window allowing to install missing package.

Other question is: should the hook block the application and retry
fontconfig font selection, or should it be completely asynchronous?

-- Petr