[Fontconfig] What to do with $HOME is unset

[Frederic Crozat]

Le dimanche 24 septembre 2006 à 11:09 +0100, Keith Packard a écrit :
> I'm reading through a bug report in the debian bug system:
> 
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=387928
> 
> It raises an interesting question on how fontconfig handles the case
> when $HOME is unset (or unwritable). When this happens, fontconfig is
> unable to write any cache files to disk, making application performance
> suffer terribly when some cache data is outdated or missing.

We encountered a similar bug on Mandriva (see
http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=25609 )
because /etc/fonts/fonts.conf wasn't updated by rpm, since I never
removed the noreplace config flag in our fontconfig package (but that is
another story :)

This "HOME not set" bug has been there for years and I'm still convinced
we should try to minimize it by using getpwent when HOME is not set
(since some people might want to override their HOME, even if I'm not
sure it is a good idea).

I'll be happy to hack a patch for it (I did one a loong time ago) if it
is going to be accepted for merge.

-- 
Frederic Crozat <fcrozat at mandriva.com>
Mandriva