Re: Low memory hacks

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Mon, 2008-03-03 at 09:05 +0000, Brian Nitz wrote:
> 
> >   Third, there's no such thing as
> > locale-specific fonts.  If a font happens to cover Chinese only, so be
> > it.  Finally, if you don't need those fonts, simply don't install them
> > (or uninstall them).  
> >   
> I know it doesn't make sense from a developer's point of view, but it 
> has been a request for end users, "We don't ever use (X language) fonts 
> in our  Hospital/Bank/University/Government Office, why are we 
> installing these fonts?"  It may be a distribution specific issue, but 
> it's probably an issue with nearly every distribution.

A logical conclusion is that if of a gazillion different Linux distros,
none fixed it, chances are high that it's not a problem to begin with.
Just because something "feels" suboptimal doesn't mean it should be
fixed.  It's not really a distro issue.  It's an integrator issue.  And
BTW being able to render Chinese just fine if a friend of mine happens
to want to check a Chinese web site on my laptop sounds like a useful
issue to me, even if I'm sacrificing 10MB of my harddisk for it.


> > If a font is installed, it HAS to be noted in the
> > cache somewhere to be discoverable by apps.
> O.K. but opening and mapping these files on every application launch 
> even when the associated fonts may _never_ be read for a particular
> user 
> doesn't seem to be the most efficient thing to do.

A very common rule for optimizing code is, don't optimize it if it's not
a bottleneck.  Say, you get rid of those 20 extra system calls out of
the 7000 system calls during a typical application startup.  You've
gained what, a 0.3% improvement in the number of syscalls.  Go translate
that to wall clock time...

Yes, of the 5GB worth of data installed on my laptop by Fedora, I
probably don't need and never use 3GB of it.  But I have better things
to do than going over the list of all five hundred thousand files on my
root partition and remove the ones I don't need.  That holds true for
most people.  If you don't like it, use LSB, or gentoo, or some other
productivity-optimized system.

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759