I emphasise, don't reply to me off-list, unless you're at one of the few
locations allowed to mail to my domain, it will bounce.
Thomas, I'm not a developer and don't want to be one, or join any
developer list. From comments you attribute to Hans, i guess he might be
interested in persuing my point.
Thomas Chung wrote:
=== Core Fonts Issues ===
An apparently slowly smoldering dispute over the treatment of older
"core fonts" flamed up in a couple a of places. This is linked in to
the larger dispute over the review queue and governance issues raised
within (see this same FWN#111 "Review Queue Cont.")
Nicolas forwarded[1] an email from @fedora-fonts from HansdeGoede
which was about the failure of post-install scriptlets to run for core
fonts rpms. Hans wondered why the files were generated this way
instead of being pre-generated and shipped in the package. Nicolas
noted that the packages which Hans was talking about followed the
provisional fontconfig guidelines and that he himself did not care
about the core font side of things. Due to the split nature of the
discussion over the two lists, it is a bit confusing trying to follow
the flow of the conversation, but it seems that BehdadEsfahbod
provided the information that fontconfig had not stored cache files in
/usr/share/fonts for some time, using /var/cache/fontconfig instead.
this may be a general problem, of which this is one instance. I've seen
KDE configuration files in /usr:
06:29 [summer@numbat ~]$ ls -l /usr/share/config/kdm/*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 3610 Nov 11 2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xaccess
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 194 Nov 12 2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xreset
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 481 Nov 11 2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xservers
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 938 Nov 11 2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xsetup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 192 Nov 12 2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xstartup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 303 Nov 11 2006 /usr/share/config/kdm/Xwilling
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 350 Nov 25 07:16 /usr/share/config/kdm/backgroundrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 1860 Nov 25 07:52 /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc
there is a serious problem here. Under FHS, /usr and /var can be
different filesystems, with the first having the distiction that it can
be mounted ro, and it can be shared between different systems.
Users on IBM mainframes have in fact been sharing /usr for years,
between the (hundreds of) virtual Linux guests they run on their zSeries
mainframes. They generally don't run GUIs though, so the fonts don't
matter a lot.
However, with the advent of virtualisation for the masses with the
introduction of Xen, it's not going to be very long before users realise
the merits of sharing /usr at a potential saving of around 7 Gbytes for
the each clone:
17:44 [summer@numbat ~]$ du -sh /usr/
du: `/usr/lib/audit': Permission denied
du: `/usr/libexec/utempter': Permission denied
6.7G /usr/
06:18 [summer@numbat ~]$
They might clone /var, but they won't be sharing it, and so the fonts
cache contains information about the fonts that are installed, it will
become out of date as maintenance is done.
If it can be prebuilt, that's what should happen; if it can't be built
at package-build time, then /usr is still the right filesystem.
The only possible alternative is /etc, but that's for per-host
configuration. Its one advantage over var that I can think of is that
people expect to have to keep an eye on /etc.
Behdad also wondered where Hans thought the files should be generated,
to which Hans replied[2] that this should be done at buildtime instead
of generating them with scriplets. Hans demonstrated[3] that
''urw-fonts'' and ''ghostscript-fonts'' had a problem because they did
not generate the ''fonts.dir'' and ''fonts.scale'' expected by older
applications such as ''xfig''. Hans suggested that some guidelines on
handling the core fonts were necessary and suggested two options, his
preferred one being to generate fonts.dir and fonts.scale at
buildtime.
Very sane. /usr is a sensible place to catalogue what's in /usr.
--
Cheers
John
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