Description of problem: We have an X11 font directory where the .pcf files are compressed using "compress" (with a .Z extension). In RedHat 9, the mkfontdir program is able to handle this, but the Fedora 2 version is not. I'm pretty sure the problem is in mkfontdir (rather than some other system configuration problem) because it works if I copy the mkfontdir binary over from a RedHat 9 system. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Easy Steps to Reproduce: 1. Make a temp dir and cd to it: mkdir /tmp/t1 cd /tmp/t1 2. Populate with a compressed file cp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/timR24.pcf.gz . gunzip timR24.pcf compress timR24.pcf 3. Run mkfontdir mkfontdir Actual results: File begins with "0" (no font files found) Expected results: File should look like: 1 timR24.pcf.Z adobe-times-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-p-124-iso10646-1 Additional info: Must have the "ncompress" rpm installed.
X.Org X11R6.7.0 has removed the UNIX compress source code from the X11 distribution due to licensing conflicts which were discovered after a license audit. As such, X.Org X11 no longer contains support for decompressing UNIX 'compress' compressed fonts. The recommended workaround is to decompress all fonts using gunzip (which can decompress UNIX compress archives), and to recompress them with gzip -9.
I've double-confirmed this with a few other developers. As mentioned above, there are potential legal issues with "compress" which were discovered during the X development cycle. The code was removed, and all support for .Z fonts was removed from libXfont. I've confirmed that upstream currently has no plans on adding back .Z compressed font support, so fonts compressed in this manner will not be supported under current or future Red Hat X releases. As mentioned above however, you can decompress .Z compressed font files using uncompress, ncompress, or gunzip, and recompress them with "gzip -9". gzipped fonts will continue to be supported by the X server, and also save disk space. Closing as "WONTFIX"