Further notes on 7.4

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 10:55:59PM +0100, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Adam Jackson wrote:
> > The core fonts are still listed there, but really, don't.  The only one
> > you want is font-misc-misc for fixed/cursor, expect the rest to leave
> > the list in 7.5.
> 
> Why? It's not as if they require a lot of maintenance. Or any
> maintenance at all, really.

Yes, but they're an enormous pain for our users who are just trying to
bootstrap from scratch.  Most users who boostrap (and I'm making a
sweeping generalisation, with a broad basis on what I've seen on both
the list and on IRC) are trying to do it for one of two reasons: either
embedded, or trying to get a new server/driver stack up.

The former really don't want core fonts, and we shouldn't be
recommending they install it.  Hence they fall out of the core
distribution.

The latter already have core fonts from their distro.

I've said before that I consider LFS and the like a relatively
uninteresting case, and people going out of their way to install weird
or proprietary apps can find and install the fonts.  It's not a huge
amount of documentation to get them to fetch and install the core fonts.

Distributions like RHEL which see a lot of proprietary/Motif app usage
will almost certainly ship with more than the bare minimum set of core
fonts, and I'd imagine OSes like Solaris where this gets used a lot will
also continue to install core fonts.  But for our userbase, it's not
hugely relevant: all they know is that builds are brittle and their
server can never find this fixed thing and oh god freetype.

Also, they never change, so what's the benefit in aggregating them in
our sixish month release cycle? Just have a wiki page with a link to the
original versions and instructions on how to install them.  Everyone
benefits (right now, font installation and configuration isn't
well-documented at all, and could certainly benefit from good docs, and
does this not act as a good motivator?).

Cheers,
Daniel
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