[Fontconfig] Fwd: [Fontconfig-bugs] [Bug 71691] New: Defaulting <cachedir> to LOCAL_APPDATA_FONTCONFIG_CACHE for Win32 build

[Akira TAGOH]

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 1:43 PM, Jehan Pagès <jehan.marmottard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd say there are 2 issues: the first launch, and next launches on
> disappearing font cache.
>
> For the first launch issue, obviously such a change would not change
> anything. For the second problem though, this would fix it.
> And actually this second issue is much more annoying than the first
> one. The first launch occurs only once per definition. So well, you
> may have a very slow first launch, happens once and for all. Annoying
> but not the worst. On the other hand, having slow startup at random
> points in time (random = each time the TMP dir is emptied for a reason
> or another), that's a *lot* more annoying for the user.

Sure. using TMP dir sounds not good right. I agreed with you at this point.

> Well I agree that system-wide cache is better in many cases. But it
> seems that Windows logics does not share much between users. When I
> search the web, it sems most applications would save their cache per
> user.
> This said, maybe such a standard shared directory exist, but I could
> not find this information...

Oh, that is what I wanted to know... hmm, we need some experts for
Windows to improve fontconfig.

> Note, while searching for system-wide cache dir, I found this
> Wikipedia page saying that thumbnail cache on Windows is also in the
> user local AppData:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_thumbnail_cache#Centralized_thumbnail_cache
>
> Of course for thumbnails, that may make more sense, security-wise,
> since you may not want other users to be able to browse thumbnails of
> images you saw, while fonts are usually less problematic, though I
> could imagine cases of users using paid font with limited licensing
> not wanting to leak information about these fonts too. In any case,
> using the locale appdata seems kind of a practice used by Microsoft
> software for caching.

Well, that kind of sensitive data could be into the user's cache
directory. the system-wide caches should be something could be
accessible for all of users, but anyway.

> In any case, even if you find and want to settle down for a
> system-wide dir, I think you need to find another one than the current
> one. One which is not wiped out regularly (so a dir not labelled as
> "temporary" basically).

Yes, definitely.

> Unfortunately the state of Windows software management seems so bad to
> me that developers have to make compromise and embed all dependencies
> in their unique installer. So I don't think an official win32 package
> would be the solution adopted by the various software using
> fontconfig. Not unless fontconfig was as much a standard as it is on
> Linux (unfortunately I feel it unlikely to happen). So I think a
> better default cache dir is the best solution for now.

I hope someone can be improved later. apparently there are no
objections nor opposed ideas on this claim - or even no one is
interested in this ;)
I'll change this for a workaround at this moment.

-- 
Akira TAGOH