Hello, I just upgraded my FC2 box to FC3 and found that the display manager gdm was unable to show the login prompts. Instead it kept restarting every few seconds, switching to virtual console 7 each time - making it quite hard and unpleasant to recover. It turned out to be due to a config.cache-1 file listing non-existent Vera.ttf and friends. This was the first font on the list of preferred sans-serif fonts. While this is really something that the gdm maintainers should look at, it made me think a step further: The distributions' installation/upgrade software need to check that at least the user root has a minimally working font configuration, no matter what the users have left behind of configuration files that worked or did not work with the previous os. This could be implemented using two tools, one that tests the basic functionality of the font rendering libraries, and one that simply produces a list of files that potentially influences the process. The reason I post here is that some aspects of such tools are perhaps much easier to maintain for those who know the font handling software intimately. I guess that for fontconfig's maintainer it would be a complete no-brainer to maintain a script that lists in order all files looked at during the font matching process. Then it would be for the distribution maintainer to rename all such files out of the way unless they were strictly as distributed, until the basic functionality is confirmed. For the maintainers of the various distributions of the various free os'es to investigate in turn what it takes to make at least some basic aspects of the install/upgrade procedures really foolproof - and keep that up to date as the zillion libraries change - that is error prone, to say the least; and this kind of issues will in the long run inevitably place an upper limit to the percieved quality of even the major distributions - unless we find ways of addressing them. I am not quite so sure about how to test the basic functionality. The end result depends on any number of layers of libraries, freetype, pango, you name it. Kde would have its stack, fltk another... Do you have any thoughts about this? -- Regards, Enrique P?rez-Terr?n -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/attachments/20050123/8ac67551/attachment.pgp
