[Fontconfig] The cache fontconfig directory

[Quanah Gibson-Mount]

--On Thursday, April 06, 2006 12:16 AM -0400 Behdad Esfahbod 
<behdad at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:

>
>> > 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.
>
> I'm just curious what would you call optimal.  You don't want to
> run fc-cache, you don't want to have writable shares, and you
> don't think per-user caches are optimal.  Having no chaches at
> all is definitely not optimal either.


Well, I guess it would depend on whether or not you use AFS.  We install 
publicly available software in a "pubsw" location.

Softare /installs/ go into the RW AFS path:

/afs/.ir/pubsw/<Category>/<package>-<version>

We then create symlinks for these into:

/afs/.ir/systems/<sysname>/pubsw/[bin,lib,etc,include,man,doc,X,info,sbin,share,package]

As you can see, no "var" directory.

Every Host system has a symlink into the pubsw RO path:

/usr/pubsw -> /afs/ir/systems/sun4x_59/pubsw/

for example, for a Solaris 9 system.

This means that programs run out of pubsw /cannot/ write back into pubsw.

In addition, all users home directories are in AFS.  While most the time it 
is possible to write into the home directory, every user has a token, which 
expires every 25 hours.  So if a user were to be using a program for a long 
period of time, and forgot to renew their token, the program would fail to 
write in the home directory.  This is why we generally prefer they try to 
write to temp space.

--Quanah

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