[Fontconfig] Marking glyphs as deliberately blank, per font

[Krzysztof Kotlenga]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

>>> What is already there is so verbose very few people use it
>>                                      ^^^^^^^^
>> You never know...
> 
> Fact: I check every single font package that ends up in Fedora. On my
> system I have
> 
> find /etc/fonts/conf.d/ | wc -l
> 239
> 
> Is that a good enough sample for you?

No. It doesn't allow you to take an assumption that very few people use
(and actually understand and are happy with) fonts.conf. There's a
world beyond Fedora, too.

>>> OTOH the match target/test is a reinvention of emacs' let's use
>>> lisp syntax as configuration syntax hell
>> 
>> This doesn't sound like technical merit.
> 
> This is not about "technical merit" as in "what fontconfig can do".
> Everyone agrees that fontconfig is a very powerful tool. This is about
> the usability of fontconfig config syntax. Currently the power of
> fontconfig is not exercised because its config language is
> over-convoluted and too low-level (either people do not try to use it
> at all, or when they shoot themselves in the foot because of the
> syntax)
> 
> This is about things like
> http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20911

One of the best answers for such statements is: patches welcome. And it
usually ends the discussion. Otherwise someone has to step up and do
the work, preferably breaking as little as possible and not forcing his
own "syntax" preferences (it's not even a syntax, because syntax is
XML). Interestingly, comments on this bug mention that Ubuntu does a
good job?

> (...) CJK packager

So perhaps we should invite them here. But this topic deserves a new
thread, or two:
- about the CJK issues
- about breaking well-established configuration format.

> PS. Why did you remove the list CC?

My mistake. I posted to the list afterward.

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The fact is, most software is crap, and most software developers
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