Re: fonts

[Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 02:53:17AM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> So, up till now fonts in Debian were supposed to be installed via
> Defoma.  Defoma has worked fairly well, but it's Debian-specific, and
> very complex.
> 
> Now however we have fontconfig, which is a more generic way for
> applications to find and use fonts.  Besides core components like GNOME,
> KDE, and Mozilla, other applications like magicpoint are now using it as
> well.  I think we should encourage this.
> 
> Defoma is not really supported by its maintainer anymore (see #180188),
> and I think that we should be moving away from using Defoma, and
> encouraging upstreams to support fontconfig.  They are not entirely
> duplicates really; Defoma as I understand it is just kind of a trigger
> mechanism, and can help non-fontconfig applications to support a variety
> of fonts. 
> 
> Now, to the issue at hand: after installing a font package, fc-cache
> must be rerun.  Now, we could continue to use Defoma, and I could have
> fontconfig install some sort of Defoma trigger to make Defoma rerun
> fc-cache.  
> But given the above, I would prefer for font packages to just invoke
> fc-cache directly in their postinst, and also for them to Depend on
> fontconfig.
> 
> This should solve #175797.
> 
> The exact code that packages should use might look something like this:
> 
>  printf "Regenerating fonts cache..." 
>  HOME=/root fc-cache -f -v 1>/var/log/fontconfig.log 2>&1 || (printf "failed; see /var/log/fontconfig.log for more information\n"; exit 1)
>  printf "done.\n"
> 
> Maybe I could put this into a little shell script in the Debian
> fontconfig package.

Or add a debhelper doing this ? If i understand debhelper well, it could
even be a little dh_fontconfig module (or whatever it is called) which
could go into the fontconfi package ?

Friendly,

Sven Luther