[Fontconfig] separate cache file from directories?

[Keith Packard]

On Fri, 2005-06-17 at 01:17 +0200, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> hi there,
> 
> I've hit on a nasty problem with fontconfig within the MacOS X port of 
> LilyPond. This program is delivered as a app-bundle, and can be 
> installed by ordinary users, simply by drag & dropping the bundle 
> somewhere.
> 
> The problem is that MacOS ships with a bunch of fonts in 
> /System/Library/Fonts. Whenever our application starts
> it scans this directory. This takes several minutes due to the oriental 
> fonts. fc-cache cannot cache this directory, since it is not writable by 
> ordinary users.

fontconfig should be caching information about those fonts in
~/.fonts.cache-1.

> I hope I'm missing an obvious solution, but a cursory glace at the FC 
> sources indicate that cache files are always written in the font 
> directory itself.

Right, per-directory caches are always placed right in the directory
with the files.  Owen Taylor asked a while ago if this couldn't be fixed
somehow, but I haven't ever bothered to try and implement anything.

One obvious kludge would be to construct a parallel hierarchy in some
writable partition and place the cache files there, similar to how CVS
manages out-of-tree lock files.

I think this would be fairly easy -- just prefixing the cache file names
with a path string.

-keith

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