Re: FW: Nautilus and Setup Tools

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes: 
>     Font installation.

Oh boy. ;-)

We _already_ have huge headaches in Red Hat with fonts being all
fucked up, because several packages are installing their own fonts,
their own font catalogs, their own mapping from print fonts to screen
fonts, etc. It's a disaster. Preston was doing an X errata Friday, and
someone that involves an Eel errata too, because of some bizarre
interaction with Eel's font stuff. I didn't ask for details. AbiWord
is constantly broken due to fonts. We have barely gotten the
gnome-print package to work, and I still don't actually understand
what the spec file is doing or should be doing, despite reading the
READMEs. Then let's add Ghostscript, OpenOffice (not in the
distribution yet, but has its own fonts), whatever Qt does...  _I_
can't figure it out. I'm making the packages. Are users going to
figure it out?

Standard programming rule: the same info simply can't be stored in two
places without screwing over everyone. Two copies = can and will get
out of sync.

Last I heard Pango is being hacked to simply read the X configuration
files (the new Xft ones) for the FreeType backend, so we get the same
font setup on client side and on the X server, at least on the same
machine. This is the right kind of direction, I hope it's going to
happen. This lets users get fonts working in both plain X and GTK with
one config file change. It is good and golden.

> We don't have solutions to these for gnome-2.0.  However, IMHO
> the eventual solution would belong in the core gnome platform.

Blargh, no! :-( There has got to be at least basic font installation
and setup on the X level.

Keith Packard is redoing the Xft font config stuff, we should
absolutely be talking to him about how to make it meet the needs of
gnome-print. I believe such assistance has been requested, in fact.

As long as we need gnome-font-install, we are in the realm of Badness.

Havoc