On Wed, 2009-11-11 at 13:11 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > Hi, > > It has been plain since 2003¹ our new font access standard would be > fontconfig. Since then most users of the old core fonts X11 backend have > migrated, but there are still a few stragglers. > > Unfortunately these stragglers matter. Core fonts were not good in 2003, > and they didn't get any better since. Few users means life-support > maintenance only, no one to replace/fix core fonts when a technical or > legal problem causes them to be dropped, no one to update them when > encoding standards change. Also, few users means we do not install core > font packages by default anymore, so packagers that depend on them but > forgot to mark the deps in their packages will deliver broken packages > to users. > > Every remaining core font user is therefore likely to hit more and more > problems as time passes. Each of those problems produces as a side > effect "Fedora fonts suck" messages on the Internet, messages that > detract on all the terrific work Fedora people do on our main font > backend (and associated fonts). End-users are not educated enough to > recognize the root of their problems is the use of a deprecated > almost-no-maintained tech (and they should not have to bother about it). > > Therefore, I'd like to identify remaining core font users, and remind > them periodically their core font use is not good for their users or for > Fedora. > > Since there is not question of deliberately removing core fonts > infrastructure from Fedora, I need to whitelist first the few files used > to maintain this infrastructure (xfontsel and xlsfonts are such files; > twm and gtk1 — not). I'd therefore be grateful if people checked the > following list and pointed to me files that need to be removed for this > reason. > > Please answer this message with statements such as "file foo can be > removed from the list because it is used this way to manage the core > fonts backend or to propagate the core font protocol to X11 clients". > > Again, widget libraries or utilities that made use of the core fonts > backend when it was the font access standard, do not count. Also modern > libraries that have some form of vestigial core fonts code hidden deep > inside them should probably just excise it (this use it probably worse > than apps that only use core fonts , since those apps at least test > regularly if their core fonts use is not totally broken). > • icewm icewm-0:1.2.37-5.fc12 > — /usr/bin/icehelp > — /usr/bin/icesh > — /usr/bin/icewm-session > — /usr/bin/icewmbg > — /usr/bin/icewmtray > — /usr/bin/icewm > • idesk idesk-0:0.7.5-9.fc12 > — /usr/bin/idesk I own both icewm and idesk. As far as I know, both icewm and idesk are linked against xft and should not default to core fonts. (Unless I completely misunderstanding something...) - Gilboa -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
