[RFC] xfs catalogues.d

[Ademar de Souza Reis Jr.]

On Tue, Jun 05, 2007 at 05:59:28PM -0400, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
> 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.

And how do you plan to control the order in which the
font-paths are listed, since it apparently matters?

(I'm not sure about how to handle it in my
proposal either)


-- 
Ademar de Souza Reis Jr.
Mandriva - http://www.mandriva.com.br

^[:wq!