fonts.dir and fonts.scale

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mer 14 octobre 2009 21:00, rotru at br.ibm.com a écrit :
> Hi,

Hi Rodrigo,

> I have read the policies pages and I am a bit confused with the lot of
> information there.

They've already been simplified for F-11, but if you have ideas on how to
improve them, they'll be very welcome.

> I split the package in 3 new ones (simple) for each font family and gave
> the proper names. My
> doubt is: the old package creates the files fonts.dir and fonts.scale
> during package installation
> (%post) using  'ttmkfdir' and 'mkfontdir' . Can someone tell me if this
> files are still necessary in
> Fedora12 or 11 ? Should I create them ?

fonts.dir and fonts.scale are used by the old X11 "core" font backend.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:FontsPolicy#Core_fonts

It's been deprecated in favour of client-side font management (fontconfig) for
about 7 years (replacing the X11 core font backend with fontconfig could
probably be considered the first step that lead to modern modularized xorg).
Nowadays almost nothing important uses the X11 core font backend in Fedora
(even emacs finally switched and emacs is not exactly an agile project)

That being said many proprietary or niche software packages still use the old
system because they either do not care a lot about i18n, or about Linux, or
want code that works the same way on antique 'classic' Unix systems
(less-antique Unix systems use fontconfig just as Linux as every single major
GUI package requires it nowadays).

If you want to expose your fonts in the core font system you'll need to
include fonts.* and symlink the directory you deploy your fonts in to
/etc/X11/fontpath.d/ (note that software that still uses the old font system
is likely to go bang if you feed it a modern font).

Fedora-side, we're not encouraging people to register new fonts in the core
font system. We're keeping just enough old core fonts to make old apps happy
(and don't install them by default anymore, so people who depend on them have
to request them explicitely, and not continue to ignore the software landscape
has changed)

I hope this is somewhat clearer.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot