Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 113692
missing file or config tweak needed?
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:35 EST
Description of problem: was looking the XFree86 log ans came across this: (WW) `fonts.dir' not found (or not valid) in "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/". Entry deleted from font path. (Run 'mkfontdir' on "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/"). look like a simple miscue on the base config. using fedora core 1 with latest up2date (unless another kernel came out while i was typing this :o). running gnome. b
Log file entries marked with (WW) are not errors, just warnings. In this case, the warning is harmless, and just drawing one's attention that a configured font directory does not contain any fonts. The "local" font directory is an XFree86 provided directory which does not contain any provided fonts, but is provided for user/sysadmin installed 3rd party fonts to be dropped in. Nothing in the distribution ever installs fonts into this location, however the font path is included in our default configuration for quite some time to make it easier on people who have used it in the past, when they upgrade their OS. Since this directory is quite old in legacy nowadays, the majority of desktop software now uses Xft/fontconfig based font access, and the X11 core fonts are deprecated, perhaps it is time for me to remove this path from our default configuration, as upgrades should retain the pre-existing config anyway nowadays. That should only really affect users who do a fresh OS installation (rather than an upgrade), and then manually install fonts into the 'local' directory, and do not manually add the directory to their fontpath. That is the same behaviour users get for any other manually installed fonts outside of rpm context, so IMHO it would be more consistant to do this, although it might break a few setups out there. I think that in this case however, it makes more sense to make the change and perhaps break a few small number of setups, than it is for 99% of users to get these warnings and be concerned about them, especially considering core fonts are becoming more and more obsolete anyway. I'll make this change once I incorporate 4.4.0 into our developmental builds. Thanks.
The "local" and "cyrillic" directories are no longer in our default xfs config. Instead, the cyrillic font package(s) in the distribution will add the "cyrillic:unscaled" entry to xfs config if it isn't present upon installation. Any rpm package which installs fonts into the "local" directory are expected to do the same, however there are no packages in the distribution which use that directory. End users who manually drop files into the "local" directory will now have to manually hand edit their xfs config or use chkfontpath by hand to add this dir to the font path. I believe this is entirely reasonable behaviour. This new behaviour will only occur on fresh OS installations however, but it will not affect systems that are upgraded from older OS releases, as we do not remove font path elements on upgrades as that might break a user's working setup. Closing as "rawhide".