Bug 175395

The main problem is that because it is postinstall running chkconfig,and
ttmkfdir. We can make it optional to run those command, but it won't work on any
native X package if the user install X later.

As this is a general font package bug, I am going to assign it to our i18n
engineer, Tagoh-san for getting more input

well, I'm just curious though, how does that PHP script use TrueType font? isn't
it on the client side but not on the server side?

PHP scripts, running under Apache, can use any TrueType fonts that exist on the
server.  This is typically used for generating dynamic images that are served
over the web, and this is fully supported by PHP.

But this is not only an issue regarding TrueType fonts and PHP.  X is not the
only piece of software that will ever use TrueType fonts.  All kinds of
software, both client- and server-side will use TrueType fonts, and these font
should be installable and usable without requiring the addition of any additioal
packages except for the font packages that are needed by whatever application is
using fonts.

Again, this points to the overly tight coupling between packages in Fedora (and
Red Hat) Linux distros, and gives other distros a significant advantage.  There
are lots of artificial dependencies between packages in all of the Fedora and
Red Hat distros, and this is just another example.  This mentality of
over-dependence between packages has been an epidemic since at least Red Hat 7.  

The main point of this bug report is that one should be able to simply install
the font RPMs that are needed, regardless of the application that is using them,
without being forced to install other unwanted RPMs (chkfontpath, ttmkfdir,
xorg-x11-font-utils, and xorg-x11-xfs).  This is especially true in a server
environment, where we don't need or want a GUI (X) or any of its components. 
The justifications are numerous, including security and ease of management. 
These are very reasonable concerns, and should be accommodated by simply
removing the dependencies, allowing the fonts to be installed independently of
any other packages.

Yes, I'm not saying to reject this at all though, was trying to find the way out
to get this working.  I however can't do remove all dependencies without any
thoughts you know because it will causes the problems related to X and current
dependencies were needed to ensure its working - creating a fonts.dir, adding a
font path to xfs , updating fontconfig cache and so on. since these TrueType
fonts were basically used for the desktop in our distro.

So we need to think about an idea not to make any regressions on this anyway.

We need to do something like what we did in %post/%postun right now because it's
necessary to ensure that the fonts can be used for X anyway. otherwise people
will complain like 'I have installed fonts-chinese package. but I can't see any
characters on my X application at all.' because of fonts-chinese will be going
to do nothing at %post/%postun for this problem then. AFAICT only the way to do
it without depending on other packages is, it uses %trigger. but using %trigger
is terrible. you may see the problem when triggered packages is renamed and so
on. I'm trying to find another way out to fix this problem now. if you have any
idea, please let us know.

just For updates, since we are getting rid of xfs, we could also get rid of the
dependencies after that so that we don't need to worry about updating fonts.dir
at the runtime and can just generate it at the build time then.

This is fixed in the new packages for F8 I believe.