libXfont and fonts.alias pointing to fonts that aren't installed

[Jeremy C. Reed]

I didn't write the below message. I'm forwarding it for someone 
else.

I was also told it should ignore dangling aliases and
actually maybe even remove them from the internal list.


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I just ran into an inconsistency in font selection and I don't
know whether this is a misconfiguration or a glitch in libXfont:
If I install the font-alias pkg I get a bunch of fonts.alias
files which point to fonts in other pkgs, and to fonts which
packages don't exist for.

Now it happened that an X application tried to load a font
using a quite generous pattern, and didn't get one unexpectedly.
There are fonts which match that pattern in my font path, but what
happened was that libXfont found a matching alias first which
pointed to nothing.

I can easily simulate this using xlsfonts:
$ xlsfonts -fn '-*-*-*-r-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
[some lines of output]
$ xlsfonts -o -fn '-*-*-*-r-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
[error]

In my case, the pattern matched a font "-sony-fixed-medium-r-...".
After I built a pkg for font-sony-misc and installed it the
problem went away.

So the question is whether stale aliases are to be considered
a misconfiguration. If so, we need to package all the missing
fonts and make font-alias depend on them.
Or, should libXfont continue iterating if it hits an alias which
cannot be followed, which would mean that there is a bug to report?

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(Again, I didn't write the above. Is there already a bug report for this?)