[Fontconfig] Re: Structure of cache files

[Josselin Mouette]

Le mercredi 05 octobre 2005 à 09:01 -0400, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
> On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 09:14 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > In this case, this is a serious violation of the Filesystem Hierarchy
> > Standard. The cache files lie in /usr/share, in which case they should
> > be strictly platform-independent.
> > 
> > Would it be possible to generate a system-wide cache and to put it
> > somewhere in /var/cache instead?
> 
> The important thing is that the same cache file can be used across
> platforms. Whether that is done by storing the data in a
> platform-independent way, or by storing multiple platform-dependent
> copies of the same data in different sections of the file shouldn't make
> any difference.

Sorry, but I strongly disagree here. You cannot call such a file
"platform-independent". This goes completely against the spirit of the
FHS, and against the Unix way of doing things. Will you tell me how, in
a real-world configuration, you're going to automate cache generation on
a /usr/share directory shared between several platforms?

This approach is perfectly suitable for the user-generated file in
$HOME, but it isn't acceptable for the system directories. Even the
fonts.cache-1 approach is quite questionable, as you always end up with
stale cache files not registered by the packaging system and never
removed.
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org
`. `'                        joss at debian.org
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