Arch Linux

Marcos FRM

Member

Registered: 2013-02-10

Posts: 14

Font packaging help

Font packages appear to not follow a strict packaging guideline.

Some depend only on fontconfig and run on post_install():

fc-cache -s

Example: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … noto-fonts

Others run on post_install():

fc-cache -s
mkfontscale /usr/share/fonts/TTF
mkfontdir /usr/share/fonts/TTF

And have vary dependencies:

fontconfig, xorg-fonts-encodings, xorg-font-utils : https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/comm … /ttf-droid
fontconfig, xorg-font-utils : https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/comm … ont-family
fontconfig, xorg-fonts-encodings, xorg-font-utils, xorg-fonts-alias: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/pack … cheapskate

I could not find an official gideline for this.

Last edited by Marcos FRM (2017-01-09 17:00:16)

Marcos FRM

Member

Registered: 2013-02-10

Posts: 14

Re: Font packaging help

Thanks to Christian Hesse fontconfig and xorg-mkfontdir now have pacman hooks to run fc-cache/mkfontscale/mkfontdir.

How shall we proceed? Drop install scripts and depend (only) on fontconfig >= 2.12.1-4 and xorg-mkfontdir >= 1.0.7-4?

eschwartz

Fellow

Registered: 2014-08-08

Posts: 4,097

Re: Font packaging help

Drop install scripts, for sure. Whether you should depend on those packages to make sure the hooks are there, is not so sure. In the unlikely event that someone does not have them already installed, what benefit do they get out of having it forced on them?

Note that anything which needs fontconfig caches also needs fontconfig, and the fontconfig install script already does "fc-cache -f" whcih will catch previously-installed fonts.
xorg-mkfontdir is a better question, since the hook will not catch previously-installed fonts which don't have updated fonts.{dir,scale} files.

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Marcos FRM

Member

Registered: 2013-02-10

Posts: 14

Re: Font packaging help

Are font files without fontconfig useful? At least on fontconfig they should depend I think. xorg-mkfontdir is probably optional, since AFAIK this mechanism is obsolete and almost without use today.