[Fontconfig] Re: Structure of cache files

[Keith Packard]

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 09:14 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 22 septembre 2005 à 23:00 -0400, Matthias Clasen a écrit :
> > So this means that the file format is not endianness- and
> > platform-independent, but contains enough information to load it on
> > other platforms ?
> 
> 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.

The files are poly-platform as they can contain per-platform sections,
so they can live outside of /var without trouble.

> Would it be possible to generate a system-wide cache and to put it
> somewhere in /var/cache instead?

The set of directories referenced by each user is different (each user
has a per-user ~/.fonts directory in the default configuration), so a
single large cache file cannot be used. And, because each user has one
(or more) private directories, we can't insist that all cache files live
in a non user-writable area.

On the other hand, there have been a few requests to make it possible to
use cache files that live outside the font directories. I've been
reluctant because of the obvious naming issues (given multiple cache
files, and multiple paths to each directory, coming up with appropriate
names is tricky).

-keith

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