I think I've narrowed down the cause of this problem a little more.
I believe it is triggered by upgrades of kdebase (which contains kcontrol,
the KDE Control Center) to 4:3.5.4-1 or later. The changelog for that
release contains the following entry:
* New upstream release:
+ fixes setting of the xrdb resource Xft.antialias to always match what's
configured in the control center, not in ~/.qt/qtrc. (Closes: #377147)
(Incidentally, #377147 was filed by me.)
I used Sergey's workaround successfully, but took snapshots of my .kde
directory at several steps to see if I could narrow down the issue.
1) DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.51.45.begin
2) DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.52.29.anti-aliasing-disabled
3) DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.54.29.anti-aliasing-disabled-re-logged-in
4) DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.55.02.anti-aliasing-re-enabled
5) DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.56.33.anti-aliasing-re-enabled-re-logged-in
The file of interest appears to be .kde/share/config/kdeglobals. Here's a
diff of this file between steps 1) and 4):
--- DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.51.45.begin/share/config/kdeglobals 2006-08-13 20:46:47.000000000 -0400
+++ DOT-KDE-2006.08.13.20.55.02.anti-aliasing-re-enabled/share/config/kdeglobals 2006-08-13 20:54:56.000000000 -0400
@@ -21,8 +21,9 @@
History Items=file://$HOME/packages/xorg-x11/svn/branches/7.1,file://$HOME/packages/xorg-x11/svn/trunk
[General]
+XftAntialias=true
XftHintStyle=hintmedium
-XftSubPixel=
+XftSubPixel=none
alternateBackground=238,246,255
background=238,238,230
buttonBackground=238,234,222
I don't know very much about how the kdeglobals file works; for instance,
if a parameter is unspecified, is a default value "inherited" from
anywhere?
At any rate, my principle of least surprise was violated. In my case, when
I first opened kcontrol after upgrading to 4:3.5.4-2 (step 1, above), the
anti-alias box was checked, indicating that anti-aliasing was "on", despite
the lack of an "XftAntialias" line in my kdeglobals.
Unfortunately, I did not get to learn if and how the user's kdeglobals file
would be updated if kcontrol were not launched.
Would it make sense for kdebase to assume anti-aliasing is on in the
absence of an XftAntialias parameter setting in kdeglobals?
(Imagine me looking beseechingly at Chrisopher Martin here.)
Eric, I won't reassign this bug to kdebase for you, but I personally am
persuaded that it should be.
--
G. Branden Robinson | There's a fine line between
Debian GNU/Linux | painting yourself into a corner and
branden@debian.org | re-engineering the universe.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Glen R. Smith
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