Subject: Re: bug#50358: [PATCH core-updates-frozen 0/8] Shortened Rust bootstrap & other fixes.

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 2021 22:56:23 -0400

Hi!

Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

> Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> skribis:
>
>> Fixes <https://issues.guix.gnu.org/31403>.
>>
>> * gnu/packages/fontutils.scm (fontconfig)[source]: Fix indentation.
>> [configure-flags]: Drop the "--with-add-fonts" configure option as it's no
>> longer necessary/desirable to special case the system and user profiles.
>> [native-search-paths]: New search path.
>
> Nice, LGTM!  Good to see a bug in the 30,000 range closed.  :-)

:-)

>> +     (native-search-paths
>> +      ;; Since version 2.13.94, fontconfig knows to find fonts from
>> +      ;; XDG_DATA_DIRS.
>> +      (list (search-path-specification
>> +             (variable "XDG_DATA_DIRS")
>> +             (files '("share")))))
>
> A potential drawback is that it’ll end up searching too many
> directories: $XDG_DATA_DIRS has 10 entries (7 if we remove duplicates)
> for me on Guix System, 3 of which have a fonts/ sub-directory.  Hmm
> maybe that’s not so bad after all.

That's a defect with XDG_DATA_DIRS :-(.

I feel like search-path-specification should be augmented to express
patterns that would be useful with search paths such as the too wide
XDG_DATA_DIRS: enable only when a child directory/file is present, for
example.

So far we've been adding ad-hoc fixes in build systems (such as for the
qt-build-system, via (guix build qt-utils)); it seems it'd be cleaner to
add this capability at the search path level.

What do you think?

Maxim