On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 04:43:11PM -0600, Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> Ken Moffat wrote:
> > Just for the record, these 700+ lines are the packages I have built
> > without libXfont, after libXfont2, and in this order.  If you care,
> > you can probably work out where I bypass 'recommended' deps (evince
> > without nautilus comes to mind, but I rebuilt it later when testing
> > the rest of gnome).
> > 
> > Summary - bdftopcf and the old 'dpi' xorg bitmap fonts need
> > libXfont, also the old xorg-server used by tigervnc.
> > 
[...]
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Your list of packages is impressive.  However I'm not sure what
> recommendations you are making. It would appear to me that we shouldn't try
> to remove libXfont if it is needed for tigervnc.  Perhaps a note that it is
> not needed if you are not going to build tigervnc would be appropriate.
> However it is only about 1 MB (240K stripped).  I suspect the benefits from
> removing it are negligible.
> 

The proposal (essentially, to deprecate them - separate them out,
note what can benefit from them, in the hope that some years in the
future we can drop them) will follow : probably not tonight.

This is associated with my desire to improve what we do with
(scalable) fonts - mostly I use TTF and OTF, but Type1 are also
scalable.  *Much* of that improvement turns out to be tuning
fontconfig, for some of that I'm still struggling (e.g. I don't have
the alternatives for MS Office fonts, but fc-match defaults
correctly for whichever is serif to a serif font, instead of my
expectation that it would pick DejaVu Sans).

Based on Roger's response, I need to try an older libXfont just in case
that makes lxdm work with current xorg-server (I suspect it doesn't,
if so, lxdm might be unusable - and I suspect any upstream is
defunct).

> To me the only drawback to the bitmapped fonts is the space they take up.
> They total about 50 MB.  On a system with Xorg, that shouldn't be a
> significant amount.  Perhaps a note about wat can be omitted or deleted
> would be appropriate, but the user notes might also be a reasonable place
> for the discussion.
> 

LOL, on my development system (with kf5 and openjdk moved out of the
rootfs because of space reasons : all BLFS packages which respect
CFLAGS now have debug info), unfortunately, or in fact fortunately
because of the space problem, I have less than 200 MB available (25
GB rootfs, I think - they are sized to allow several systems at a
time, and to not blow out my backups).

Hmm, I think you said you like the Luxi TTF fonts (or did you mean
Type1 ?).  If people follow the book and install all core fonts, they
get both the TTF and the scalable Type1 versions - generally, that
seems like unnecessary redundancy.

Also, the dpi core fonts (bitmap) are ugly.  While googling for
various things related to TTF/OTF fonts, or fontconfig, I've found
many old references to how ugly fonts are (were), e.g. 10 years ago.

But because we encourage people to dump all these fonts into their
system, we maintain some of that: if a page asks for Helvetica and
you have installed an adobe-*dpi font, that bitmap version of
Helvetica will be used.  I'm intending to include an example of how
to stop fontconfig using that in my proposal.

However, putting details about how to tune fontconfig into the book
is deferred until I'm more sure of various details, and probably
until I've looked at the ChromeOS fonts with the same metrics as the
MS Office fonts - Douglas mentioned before that he needed to use
those.  For those of us without MS Office who need to share
spreadsheets or wordprocessor files with MS users I now understand
the issue.

And looking at those fonts will come after I've looked at various
Tex Gyre fonts (you can probably guess that I've spent far too much
time lthis weekend looking at the details of OTF and TTF fonts), I've
still got at least one Arkandis font to look at before those - I
suppose I might update my fonts site at that point.

> If I understand it properly, the network-manager-applet is designed to be
> launched from a window manager panel.  The server is designed to be started
> from a boot script.  The only place nm/nm applet is really useful is on a
> laptop where you may want to access a foreign network.
> 

Yes, agreed.  My test machine is a desktop, with only wired network,
and using the sysv version of the book.  I built the applet because
it is in the gnome part of the book.

> Are there specific changes to the book that should be made?  Are there
> inoperative programs that need to be addressed as separate tickets?
> 
>   -- Bruce
> 
> 
Proposal re libXfont, bdftopcf, bitmap fonts and xscreensaver,
tigervnc to follow.  For lxdm, the situation is currently uncertain.
For glxgears, it works on my preferred windowmanager and also on xfce
and kde so "works for me" ;)

ĸen
-- 
`I shall take my mountains', said Lu-Tze. `The climate will be good
for them.'     -- Small Gods
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