[Fontconfig] Re: Crash when non-existing directories are referenced in ~/.fonts.cache

[Patrick Lam]

I have internet access again and can commit some patches...

Matthias Clasen wrote:
> [fc-cat goes in an infinite loop]

It looks like Mike Fabian got that one.  I'll take a look at it now.

> It seems to me that all the recent breakage is due to the global cache. 
> It just complicates the caching logic a lot. Would be it be too hard to just demand
> fc-cache being run after installing new fonts ? We do that for everything else thats
> cached, like icon themes, mime data, etc...

The recent breakage is, in my opinion, due to putting directory caches
into /var/cache/fontconfig and the resulting changes in global and
directory cache files needed to support this.  I'm not sure that this
was, in fact, an improvement, and complicated a lot of the code; it
helps satisfy some FHS constraint, but seems to be hard to get right and
is still conceptually a bit problematic.  It was much simpler to put
font caches in their own directories.

I don't think it's appropriate to demand that fc-cache be run after
installing new fonts, especially since fc-cache runs as root and users
can install their own fonts.  That would make fontconfig worse than it
is now.

pat