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

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2021 21:56:15 +0200

Hi Maxim,

Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:

[...]

>> I think it would be nice to have a FONTCONFIG_FONT_PATH variable that
>> would only look at share/fonts.
>
> That'd be nice, but probably harder to convince them than for
> XDG_DATA_DIRS, as we'd probably be the only user.

Dunno, not necessarily.

>> What you describe would have uses beyond fontconfig, which is nice.  The
>> downside is that it would make search path semantics and their
>> implementation more complex; we’d have to see what the impact is.
>
> Yes, more complexity, but localized (and can be tested), rather than
> diffused (and untested) as of now.
>
>> Thinking about it, I wonder if having (file-pattern "^fonts$") would
>> work here.  But then, what if a profile contains several packages with
>> an XDG_DATA_DIRS search path but different ‘file-pattern’ values?…
>
> Perhaps this could work too, *if* the behavior of various same-named
> environment variable specifications is to be combined into a logical OR
> manner (I haven't checked what the current behavior is, but I seem to
> recall it not working from past experiments).

Yes, from what I see, ‘evaluate-search-paths’ would need a
post-processing step to concatenate the results of same named variables.

The only issue is that it returns a list of specification/value pairs,
where the assumption is that one specification corresponds to one value.
We’d need to check call sites and see whether it’s a problem to dismiss
all but the first spec of a given search path, for instance.

Thanks,
Ludo’.