[Fontconfig] Re: Structure of cache files

[Matthias Clasen]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 23:05 -0400, Patrick Lam wrote:
> Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > So this means that the file format is not endianness- and
> > platform-independent, but contains enough information to load it on
> > other platforms ?  Does the current loader support loading cache files 
> > from other platforms ?
> > 
> > I guess I should just test that...
> 
> It can't possibly be platform-independent if it's to be mmapped...
> otherwise you end up making another copy of the data before you can use
> it, which eliminates the whole space savings benefit.

Well, you can't use it as C structures, thats true. But if you look at
e.g. the GTK+ icon cache or the xdgmime cache formats, it is possible to
design e.g. a hashtable in a way which allows it to be directly used
out of a platform-neutral mmapped file.

> I've tested it on multiple platforms before, but please test it again.
> It was designed to work on multiple platforms, by keeping one copy per
> platform (all the copies are stored in the same file, but in different
> sections).

Ah, how does that work ? Do I have to run fc-cache on all platforms I
want to have caches for ?

Matthias