fontconfig madness

[Steve Kargl]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 10:02:24AM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Steve Kargl <
> sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 11:44:12AM +0200, Tijl Coosemans wrote:
> > > On Mon, 12 Aug 2013 12:27:45 -0700 Steve Kargl wrote:
> > > > I upgraded my freebsd-current system to  revision 254098
> > > > and followed this by deleting all installed ports except
> > > > pkg.  After rebuilding all ports, it seems fontconfig has
> > > > lost it mind (or someone made a chnage to where fontconfig
> > > > thinks it should cache fonts).  Every time I run acroread8
> > > > to view a pdf file, acroread8 creates a new fontconfig/
> > > > in the CWD instead of using ~/.fontconfig.  How do I (un)fix
> > > > whatever was changed?
> > > >
> > > > I seem to have the most up-to-date ports.
> > > >
> > > > % pkg info | grep fontconf
> > > > fontconfig-2.10.93,1           An XML-based font configuration API for
> > X Windows
> > > > linux-f10-fontconfig-2.6.0     An XML-based font configuration API for
> > X Windows (Linux Fedora 10)
> > > > % pkg version -vl '<' | grep fontconfig
> > >
> > > I see this too with every linux program that uses fontconfig.
> >
> > After a few hours of poking around, I've believe that I've
> > narrowed the issue down to a decision by the developers of
> > fontconfig to deprecate the default location ~/.fontconfig.
> > I added a /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf, which contains
> >
> > <cachedir prefix="~">.fontconfig</cachedir>
> >
> > to recover the old behavior
> >
> 
> Steve,
> 
> It seems like the term "madness" is entirely appropriate to such a change.
> Is there a commit log that you have found indicating that ti was
> deliberate? I am at a loss as to why such a change would be made. (I am
> also at a loss, even after reading all of the discussion, on why Mozilla
> decided to remove the "automatically load images" preference checkbox, so
> I'm not ruling anything out.)
> 

I can't find the site where I got this impression of the deprecation.
It seems that freetype2 wants to enforce the layout from XDG base
directory specification.  If one looks in /usr/local/etc/fonts/fonts.conf,
one sees

<!-- Font cache directory list -->

        <cachedir>/var/db/fontconfig</cachedir>
        <cachedir prefix="xdg">fontconfig</cachedir>
        <!-- the following element will be removed in the future -->
        <cachedir>~/.fontconfig</cachedir>

AFAICT, that future is now.

-- 
Steve