[Fontconfig] FcFontMatch oddities

[Roman Shaposhnick]

Guys,

after spending an entire afternoon reading source for fontconfig and Xft
and doing some experimenting it seems that I really need some help with
understanding what seems to be an explicit design decision.

The question is quite simple -- it seems that quite explicitly fontconfig
doesn't let a client application request an exact set of properties for
a font and how this font is supposed to be rendered. Basically, even though,
I can do something like:

   $ xterm -fa 'mono:bgr'

and even though at a pattern level ':bgr' gets recognized and passes upstream,
when it comes to 'FcFontMatch' everything that has to do with the rendering
gets stripped.

So the question is -- why not let client tell the library *everything* why
limit the choice to 'font-lookup' properties only ?

Thanks in advance,
Roman.