Keith Packard wrote: > It doesn't matter -- each global cache entry has a private timestamp > which is compared only against the font file timestamp. The directories > which aren't in the per-dir cache system are *always scanned* and > compared with global cache entries. This means that any changes in the > configuration will automatically get reflected in the cache file. There seems to be some confusion about the behaviour of the cache. Here's some documentation, and a question. fontconfig's inputs are a config file and a set of fonts. It then generates FcPatterns for the fonts present and specified in the config files. To speed up the generation of FcPatterns, fontconfig generates two caches: a global cache and a per-directory cache. The per-directory cache stores serialized versions of FcPatterns for all of the fonts in a directory; when a per-directory cache is deserialized, then only fonts which are accepted by the configuration are added to the configuration's FontSet. Since a separate program creates the per-directory caches, the overhead of loading all fonts here is not excessive. We have two choices for the global cache. Either it can contain all of the fonts in the directory cache, or it can contain only the accepted fonts. If the global cache contains only accepted fonts, we have a dependency between the global cache and the configuration, but loading the caches is much simpler (and probably faster): fontconfig just compares the directory last-modified time with the global cache last-modified time; if the directory is older than the cache, fontconfig then reads in the cached information for a directory (without further processing). On the other hand, if the global cache contains all fonts, then the invocation of fontconfig which creates or updates a global cache is responsible for loading all fonts in a directory, writing that to disk, and selecting only accepted fonts for subsequent use. The load-cache-from-disk process also would need to select accepted fonts in that case. Currently, the global cache code stores only accepted fonts, but does not record a dependency of the cache information on the configuration information. pat
