On Mon, 13 Jan 2003, Dr Andrew C Aitchison wrote: >> xfree86 developers: could the X server be made to look in the obvious >> places for fonts in case everything else fails? Or have the "fixed" font >> compiled in, somehow? That should cut down the number of bug reports by >> end-users a good deal (10-20% ?). > >I believe that the fixed fonts are about to be compiled into the main >server, as they already are in Kdrive; I think that this is a good idea. > >However, although I think it will cut down the number of end-user >complaints to this list, I'm not sure that it will make users happier. >With this fix, if they have a broken font setup the server will start, >but they will not get the fonts that they are expecting. They will be >unhappy, but I think that fewer people will complain.
I think just as many people would complain, only that the problem would be more obscure in bug reports. >Looking in the obvious places isn't so easy, because the obvious >places to look are "every directory inside >/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts", but some directories in there are not >appropriate some of the time (it depends which font modules you >have installed). We could try to automate setting the font path >if the config file doesn't define one at all, but I don't like >the idea of the server guessing where to look if the configured >path is bad. I don't like the idea of the X server guessing where fonts are either. The solution IMHO to font related problems like this, is to analyze why the font configuration is broken, and come up with ways to make sure those problems can't happen if possible. Like my mkfontdir patch for example. It forces the fonts.dir and encodings.dir files, when written to be mode 644 always. This could be turned into a configurable option as well, but I couldn't think of any reason why someone would want different behaviour, and nobody was able to provide a reasonable reason for me why the patch shouldn't be applied to CVS. I'll probably post it for discussion on the devel@ list soon for people to comment on and make suggestions. If people can categorize other similar problems (such as xfs not starting if /tmp is full) perhaps we could work together to brainstorm some solutions to other problems as well. We've got several ugly hacks in our xfs initscript which attempt to provide font sanity. They succeed in may ways, but fail in others craptasitcally. I hope to come up with a better way sometime before long. TTYL -- Mike A. Harris And the lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou write thy holy code. Indenting shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shalt be the spaces thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shalt be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor count thou two, excepting that thou then proceedeth to three. Eight is right out. Once the number three, being the third number be reached, shalt thou move towards indenting thy next line. (The Holy Editor of Antinoch) _______________________________________________ XFree86 mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xfree86
