Bug#335064: xbase-clients: mkfontscale installs faulty fonts.scale for ttf-bitstream-vera pkg.
Package: xbase-clients
Version: 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1
Severity: important
After installing the ttf-bitstream-vera font package,
I find that X gives a "could not init fontpath element"
error message for the TrueType fonts. This appears to be
caused by faulty fonts.dir and fonts.scale files created in
/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType directory; they have
blanks instead of underscores in the XLFDs for the Bitstream fonts.
The blanks make X barf when it tries to set up these fonts.
I have inspected the defoma hintfile installed with the Bitstream
package. It gives the font families as Bitstream-Vera-Sans,
Bitstream-Vera-Serif, etc., which is (I think) reasonable.
Probably the problem could be avoided for *this* font by changing
the hyphens to underscores; but it seems to me the X utilities
ought to be written to handle such cases gracefully, rather than
making everybody who packages a font worry about replacing (normal)
hyphens with (ugly) underscores in the defoma hintfiles. That's why
I'm filing this bug against xutils (which provides mkfontdir)
and xbase-clients (the package that provides mkfontscale).
It may turn out that both these programs use some common xlib
function to parse fontnames and font-family names, in which case
this bug should be reassigned to the appropriate package.
Note, by the way, that defoma's Defoma::Id module correctly
handles these fonts, installing XLFD names with underscores in the
/var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/id-cache file.
A further complication is that Bug 219854 says that TrueType fonts
should be using mkttfdir rather than mkfontdir, and that a bug
report should be filed against font packages that violate this.
This is evidently the case with the Bitstream font package; I see my
system doesn't even have the fttools package installed, which should
have been a dependency of the font package if it had used mkttfdir.
It remains to be seen whether mkttfdir handles font-family names
containing hyphens correctly....
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-k7
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Versions of packages xbase-clients depends on:
ii cpp 4:3.3.5-3 The GNU C preprocessor (cpp)
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libdps1 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 Display PostScript (DPS) client li
ii libexpat1 1.95.8-3 XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii libfontconfig1 2.3.1-2 generic font configuration library
ii libfreetype6 2.1.7-2.4 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii libgcc1 1:3.4.3-13 GCC support library
ii libice6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii libncurses5 5.4-4 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libpng12-0 1.2.8rel-1 PNG library - runtime
ii libsm6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System Session Management
ii libstdc++5 1:3.3.5-13 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii libxaw7 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Athena widget set library
ii libxcursor1 1.1.3-1 X cursor management library
ii libxext6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System miscellaneous exte
ii libxft2 2.1.7-1 FreeType-based font drawing librar
ii libxi6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System Input extension li
ii libxmu6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System miscellaneous util
ii libxmuu1 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 lightweight X Window System miscel
ii libxpm4 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X pixmap library
ii libxrandr2 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System Resize, Rotate and
ii libxrender1 0.8.3-7 X Rendering Extension client libra
ii libxt6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Toolkit Intrinsics
ii libxtrap6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System protocol-trapping
ii libxtst6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System event recording an
ii libxv1 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System video extension li
ii xfree86-common 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System (XFree86) infrastr
ii xlibmesa-gl [libgl 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 Mesa 3D graphics library [XFree86]
ii xlibmesa-glu [libg 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 Mesa OpenGL utility library [XFree
ii xlibs 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Keyboard Extension (XKB) configu
ii xlibs-data 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 X Window System client data
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.2-4.sarge.2 compression library - runtime
-- no debconf information
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