What does fc-cache do? (was: Re: [ports-i386@FreeBSD.org: linux-pango-1.2.1_2 failed on i386 4-exp])

[Alexander Leidinger]

On Mon, 27 Dec 2004 10:33:45 -0800
Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:

[x11@ CCed]

> On Sun, Dec 26, 2004 at 08:54:07PM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> > On Sun, 26 Dec 2004 07:17:01 -0800
> > Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > > > /compat/linux/usr/bin/fc-cache: "/root/.fonts": no such directory, skipping
> > > > > /compat/linux/usr/bin/fc-cache: succeeded
> > > > 
> > > > There are no font directories. We get them from the FreeBSD install of
> > > > X11. Since we don't depend upon the FreeBSD X11 bits, we don't get them.
> > > > 
> > > > Should I let it depends upon some fonts (and if yes, on which ones), or
> > > > should I assume an user which needs linux X11 bits already has the
> > > > FreeBSD X11 bits installed (the fc-cache run is in the pkg-install
> > > > script)?
> > > 
> > > Probably we should depend on the FreeBSD X11 fonts here, otherwise
> > > this won't work well by default
> > 
> > I don't think we can do that. The X11 fonts have a dependency upon
> > xorg-clients and xorg-libraries (and some more). I think we should
> > depend upon common sense (why should we install a linux port which
> > depends upon X11 before we installed the FreeBSD X11). It may not a very
> > good dependency, but for most of the cases it should be ok, and we don't
> > need to rework the FreeBSD X11 font handling so close before the freeze.
> 
> It needs to be carefully tested.  For example, this might happen by
> accident if someone installs packages from sysinstall (l comes before
> x, so the packages might get installed first).

I thought a little bit about this issue (someone at x11@ should correct
me if something doesn't work as expected):

Running the FreeBSD fc-cache program should be enough (it creates the
fonts.cache-1 files). I don't think we need to run the linux fc-cache
program (maybe we should remove the run of fc-cache when we install the
linux-fontconfig port). I can't identify something else the fc-cache
program does than creating the fonts.cache-1 files, at least the
man-page doesn't mentions more. Since nobody will be able to run a linux
X11 program without an X server, and since fonts are a server side issue
(at least they where the last time I looked at this topic), we should be
on the safe side to not depend upon any fonts on the linux side.

BTW: not all font ports run fc-cache:
	grep -R fc-cache /usr/ports/x11-fonts | grep -v fontconfig


[non x11@ issue follows]
> I'm not sure how the linux ld works: maybe it automatically checks
> those directories at runtime, so rerunning ldconfig is not necessary
> as it is on FreeBSD.

If it doesn't check them automatically, the pango-querymodules program
will not run.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
            Yes, I've heard of "decaf." What's your point?

http://www.Leidinger.net                       Alexander @ Leidinger.net
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