Subject: Re: [bug#39602] Generate font catalogues for the X server

From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2020 22:11:01 +0200

Ivan Kozlov <[email-masked]> writes:

> Actually, I am sending this as a patch.
>
> This should produce a "share/fontpath.d" directory in the profile which is a font catalogue as described in Xserver(1). Then the X server font path can be set to include this catalogue and it will find the installed fonts. This concerns all legacy X11 applications using the core fonts system, and most importantly xterm.
>
> The hook ‘fonts-dir-file’ was originally added for this purpose as the comments can tell; you would include e. g. "share/fonts/X11/misc" from the profile in the font path, which is a union directory with symbolic links to fonts that want to install there and a fonts.dir file describing all of them. This has not been working for ages, since the X.org server stopped following symbolic links to font files for security reasons. It should be removed.

Thanks for this investigation, and the patch!

Overall it LGTM, but I wonder how useful it is, seeing as no one has
reported the issue.  Would it make sense to add hooks in the
configuration system instead for setting font path and a font union?

A patch to remove the legacy broken 'fonts-dir-file' generation from
(guix profiles) would be welcome, by the way.

Thanks,
Marius