[Fontconfig] The cache fontconfig directory

[Quanah Gibson-Mount]

--On Wednesday, April 05, 2006 11:31 PM -0400 Patrick Lam <plam at MIT.EDU> 
wrote:

> Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
>> Is there any way to *not* use/disable the {localstatedir}/fontconfig
>> directory?
>>
>> We use AFS at Stanford, and I do not want this created or used at all.
>> I tried making this be /var/cache/fontconfig, but this gives me
>> permission denied errors on make install, and in any case, I want to
>> make sure that fontconfig never tries to use whatever directory I set it
>> to.
>
> First of all, {localstatedir}/fontconfig should only be writable by root.
> Only fc-cache creates files in that directory.

Okay.  I guess we'll never be using fc-cache (I've built this for gd, more 
than anything else, which only wants the libraries).

> If {localstatedir}/fontconfig does not exist or is not writeable, then
> fc-cache will write files to the font directories themselves (if it can).

Yeah, this won't happen either, given the RW/RO nature of AFS.

> When fontconfig-using applications run and don't find cache information
> in {localstatedir}/fontconfig or the font directories, they create a
> per-user cache file which lives in that user's home directory.

Okay.  Still not the most optimal behavior, but acceptable I guess.

> You have found a bug in fontconfig in that make install fails if it can't
> make the {localstatedir}/fontconfig directory.  I don't know how to fix
> that bug, but I'd welcome patches.  You just need to find the line where
> it creates the directory and add a -; the complication is that we go
> through automake, etc.


Well, the other part of the problem here that I see, is that it hard codes 
the word "cache", too (at least in the release I'm using):

configure.in:pkgcachedir='${localstatedir}/cache/'${PACKAGE}

which I think is a very bad practice. ;)

--Quanah

--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITS/Shared Application Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html