Since the introduction of Keith Packard's Xft library to XFree86 years ago, and the second incarnation of Xft coupled with Keith's fontconfig, it seemed natural that at some point in the future, the majority of modern desktop applications being developed would move away from the legacy X Window system's "core fonts" system and use the far superior Xft/fontconfig system. However, since there are a large number of Xt, Xaw, and Motif based applications out there, as well as applications which use other less common toolkits - all of which use the core fonts system, it was obvious that we would need to provide core fonts compatibility in our OS products for the forseeable future. The simplest thing to do, was to just leave the existing system as it was, under the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" principle, which is what I have pushed for since the Red Hat Linux days when we deprecated xfs and core fonts, reserving the future right to make changes if the need arose. For the last 3 Fedora Core releases, there has been a lot of increasing pressure both in the community, and internally, to reduce the reliance of Fedora Core on the core fonts system, and so this problem has been investigated each release to determine wether it was the right time to make any dramatic changes or not. While the migration from monolithic X.Org 6.8.x to X.Org 7.0 introduced quite a number of rather major changes in the way the X Window System is packaged, maintained and integrates into the OS, we managed to keep the core fonts system intact, and decided to keep xfs as the default solution for Fedora Core 5. Now that we have begun the Fedora Core 6 cycle, this problem domain is once again on the chopping block so to speak, and there is increasing pressure to reduce our dependency on the xfs font server and the legacy core fonts system. In particular, xfs and core fonts does not fit well into the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort, or other Fedora derived embedded distributions. In these embedded systems, or reduced computing environments if you will, every megabyte of disk space and memory counts. Shedding megs of stuff out of the default OS installation is sure to reduce both the memory footprint and disk footprint of the OS installation, which is a net gain for these systems, and also for a lot of the userbase out there that do not use any applications which rely on core fonts. On the other hand, there are many applications included both in Fedora Core, and in Fedora Extras, which do rely on the core fonts system still, and are likely to rely on it for the forseeable future. There are also many 3rd party open source and commercial applications, as well as custom in-house applications that many users and/or companies rely on, and will want to keep working in new OS releases. As such, for the present time and forseeable future, we still need to provide core fonts support in the OS, however in the interest of moving forward, and reducing dependencies on legacy technology, we would like to make the xfs font server an optional part of OS installation, and change the default configuration of the X server to not require xfs. Additionally, the font packages would need to be changed to not have indirect dependencies on xfs (through a dependency on chkfontpath). Since this is a change which is likely to affect many users out there, I thought it was best to discuss this problem with the community right away, and get everyone involved in the problem solving and decision making process, in hopes that we can collectively come up with the best solution overall which balances the needs of all users, while at the same time keeping things as simple as we possibly can. Here is a bit of background on the OLPC issue: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=192416 We look forward to hearing your constructive feedback and suggestions as to how best to attack this problem. Please respond to this thread on-list, and if you have any comments to add to the OLPC bug report above, please feel free to provide some constructive feedback there as well. Thanks in advance for your contributions. -- Mike A. Harris * Open Source Advocate * http://mharris.ca Proud Canadian. -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
