[Fontconfig] fontconfig 2.4.0

[Albert Chin]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2006 at 07:08:32PM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-09-12 at 20:25 -0500, Albert Chin wrote:
> 
> > Ugh. So, fontconfig no longer looks for cache files in the font
> > directories it searches? This means that if someone deploys fontconfig
> > on an NFS server, every client must have /var/cache/fontconfig or
> > similar. Not fun.
> 
> Yes. Better than requiring that the remote directories be writable by
> every client. You're spending disk space, but saving huge amounts of
> memory as all applications share the same cache.

The quickest way to deploy a font is over NFS. Add the directory to
fonts.conf (unless using a global font directory), fc-cache the NFS
directory, and you're done. Now, it seems you have to add the
directory to fonts.conf and then update the cache on every client.

Why not just have a global cache _and_ use the fonts.cache files in
font directories? This would seem to solve both cases. Then, those who
choose to pollute their file system with cache files are the only ones
doing so.

> Of course, if you like, you can point the font configuration at a remote
> directory containing cache files; that's easy to set up.

If no global /var/cache/fontconfig exists, will fontconfig internally
cache the font directories? Suboptimal but I just want to make sure
fontconfig will still work if no global cache exists.

-- 
albert chin (china at thewrittenword.com)