Bug#362894: x11-common: font system completely f***ed up: fixed font not found
On Sun, Apr 16, 2006 at 12:13:43PM +0200, Norbert Preining wrote:
> It seems that the font organization is completely crazy now:
> - X cannot find the fixed font anymore:
> The fixed enty in fonts.alias in /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc is not
> included in the fonts.dir file
> - there are still two different hierachies: Up to now the xorg.conf
> files contain as fontpath /usr/lib/X11/fonts ...
> But /usr/lib/X11/fonts -> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts but the later
> is DIFFERENT from /usr/share/fonts/X11/...
> so in effect the fonts in /usr/share/fonts/X11 are not included in
> the font path at all.
> - there are no man pages how to update the font system: mkfontdir which
> has been used till now is nothing else the mkfontscale script.
>
> All this is grave because one cannot start the X server, and even
> playing around with /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc and mkfontdir didn't fix
> the situation (the script could give a warning message that now you
> should use update-what-the-hell). After adding the fonts.scale by hand
> and adding it to the fonts.dir still now work, because of the above
> fonts path hierachy mismatch. What a grat disaster, to be honest!
When it gives you that message, it does actually mean it ...
This is the recommended way to update it:
update-fonts-alias misc
update-fonts-dir misc
update-fonts-scale misc
> Forthermore, please include documentation, write up some transition
> document, it is NOT up to the user to find out everything by themselves.
This will be done, but in the meantime -- if you are unable to cope with
such transitions, unstable is probably not for you.
It mostly works for everyone, but in such an enormous transition (a
~60MB source package transitioning to something like 200 source
packages, as well as moving out of a directory hierachy that Debian has
known since its inception), you have to expect that the road will be a
little bumpy. Yes, it's getting fixed, but these changes have been in
Ubuntu and in experimental[0] for quite some time with the opportunity
to test same, and the bugs reported there were ironed out.
If you're running unstable, you're going to need to have a little
patience with the process. That's just the way it goes, I'm afraid.
Cheers,
Daniel
[0]: With minor modifications, e.g. /usr/share/fonts/X11 instead of
/usr/share/X11/fonts.
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