[Fontconfig] fc-cache does not work with Cygwin

[Michael Garvin]

Hi, I've been trying to fix the problem with all of my Cygwin (Widnows XP)
Gtk and Qt applications being slow (taking about 5minutes to startup).  I've
been able to verify that the issue is due to Freetype being used, and in
turn; font-config being used to list off the available fonts on startup. The
problem is that font-config never actually caches anything, so any
font-config using application, has the same (realliy bad) start up
time.every time.

 

I tried running fc-cache manually but to no avail; I double checked time
stamps, having write permission any problems with the configuration file,
bad install of the Cygwin packages etc, but no matter what, fc-cache always
fails on all possible font directories with:

 

  failed to write cache

 

After googling around trying all the suggested solutions, nothing was
helping, and I ran strace and looked through the detailed system calls.  It
turns out fc-cache tries to open cache files in read only mode.    Which
means there is no way it can create cache files L 

 

So, I downloaded the source, compiled it up and added printf statements
throughout the call chain from scanDirs() downwards, and picked a single
directory to try and cache (the Type1 fonts directory for Cygwin).  This is
what I see:

 

bash-3.2$ ./fc-cache.exe --force --really-force /usr/share/fonts/Type1/

X: FcDirCacheValid /usr/share/fonts/Type1

X: FcDirCacheValidConfig calling through to FcDirCacheProcess

X: FcDirCacheProcess
cache_base=/d62e99ef547d1d24cdb1bd22ec1a2976-le32d8.cache-3

X: FcDirCacheProcess
cache_hashed=/home/Mike/.fonts.cache-2/d62e99ef547d1d24cdb1bd22ec1a2976-le32
d8.cache-3

X: opening
/home/Mike/.fonts.cache-2/d62e99ef547d1d24cdb1bd22ec1a2976-le32d8.cache-3
O_RDONLY | O_BINARY

X: FcDirCacheProcess fd=-1

/usr/share/fonts/Type1: failed to write cache

bash-3.2$

 

The X: . lines are my printf statements I added to the code. 

 

I looked through the code by hand, from main(), to scanDirs() and downwards,
there is no possible way that I can see for fc-cache to actually create
caches on disk.   The code that prints out the failed to write cache message
is just calling FcDirCacheValid(), but this function is not used to create
cache files (the error message of "write failed is meaningless), only to
open then and check that they are valid (hence strace shows opening of cache
files in read only mode with no creat flag..consistent at least).

 

So from what I can tell, fc-cache is not the program to use to populate the
font caches the very first time.  

 

My question is, what program do I use?  Can you update your documentation to
correctly point to the right program to use?  

 

This has been very frustrating to try and track down.   I guess when I have
time next, I'll try to understand the "init" call tree that actually does
call the functions which build cache files (FcDirCacheScan), and maybe write
a little program that specificalliy calls those functions so I can get my
caches populated, but I really don't think I should have to do that.
fc-cache should work as its manpage says L 

 

(^_^)/

Mike.

 

Michael Garvin

mgarvin at bell.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/fontconfig/attachments/20101129/a0a97209/attachment.htm>