[RFC] xfs catalogues.d

[Kristian Høgsberg]

On 6/5/07, Ademar de Souza Reis Jr. <ademar at mandriva.com.br> wrote:
> Hi there.
>
> xfs currently has its list of catalogues (font directories)
> inside its configuration file (e.g. /usr/lib/X11/fs/config).
>
> Font directories are added/removed by changing this configuration
> file, usually calling an application such as chkconfig. On xfs
> upgrades, it's necessary to validate the config file and import
> the changes from the old configuration file to the new one.
> As we all know, handling a config file automagically is quite
> error prone.
>
> I would like to improve this schema by implementing a dynamic
> catalogues.d/ directory where one could just add files containing
> the entries (similar to the mechanism used by several known
> projects). This way it would be trivial to add/remove entries and
> the upgrade scenario would be clean.
>
> I would also change the chkconfig utility (used by most
> Linux distributions, don't know about other OSes) to accept a new
> cmdline option to handle the catalogues.d entries.
>
> The change would keep backward compatibility (catalogues= would
> still be accepted inside the config file and chkconfig would
> still work the old way by default).
>
> Comments? In particular, besides chkconfig, how else are
> catalogues handled? Is there any other tool to optimize this
> task?

We've (Fedora) been talking about how to make this less painful, and
so far, the simplest and easiest idea we've come up with is to add
recursive scanning.  So instead of specifying each individual font
dir, we could add a new type of fpe that takes a top level directory
and recursively descends into all subdirectories, looking for
fonts.dir files.

Kristian