Modular Packaging: Font Aliases
Hey everyone,
So I thought I'd get some thoughts on the font aliases situation. I
haven't done all the research yet, so this is also partially a cheap way of
asking for someone more knowledgeable than me to explain it so I don't have
to go code diving for a few hours :-)
Briefly, many fonts need an alias. The most important example of the
function of these aliases is to provide the "fixed" font which the X server
requires to run. This seems to be all that's stopping me from running the
modular server in a chroot from packages, although I did have to do a few
manual symlinks that'll be handled by one of the -common packages. So
anyway, these aliases are important.
Currently, the aliases for the various fonts are kept in a separate
module from the fonts themselves by upstream (font/alias). This appears to
be problematic, since the alias file seems to be statically generated. Now
we have the update-font-aliases tool that Branden wrote, which I just put
in to font/util/debian/local which will currently install with
xfonts-utils. I haven't looked at this tool in depth yet, but it might not
be immediately useable with the new organization.
Either way, we have to decide what to do with the aliases shipped by
upstream. Do we ship an xfonts-aliases package that includes all the
aliases in font/alias? Alternately, we can copy the individual font.alias
files installed by the upstream alias module to their individual packages.
Upstream has grouped them by 100dpi, 75dpi, misc, and cyrillic, which
matches our own previous and current package structure currently, so there
shouldn't be a problem. I'd just drop them in the debian dir and install
them. I'm leaning towards this latter solution, although I'm not sure this
is the correct method. Comments?
- David Nusinow
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