Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 164343
system-config-*: No fonts found
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:10 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050719 Fedora/1.7.10-1.5.1 Description of problem: After having tried to strip down/minimize a rpm/yum/apt based install of FC4, several system-config-* tools issue an error similar to this at startup: # system-config-securitylevel No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not correctly configured. You may need to edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information about fontconfig can be found in the fontconfig(3) manual page and on http://fontconfig.org Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. ssh -X root@remotesystem 2. Deinstall all font rpms and dependencies of them. 3. yum install system-config-* config tools (e.g. system-config-securitylevel or system-config-network; I haven't tried others) 4. Launch one of the system-config-* tools Actual Results: # system-config-securitylevel No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not correctly configured. You may need to edit the fonts.conf configuration file. More information about fontconfig can be found in the fontconfig(3) manual page and on http://fontconfig.org Expected Results: system-config-* tools should start. "yum install fonts-x11-base" resolves this issue at least for system-config-securitylevel and system-config-network. Additional info: I am aware, this isn't necessarily an xorg-x11 problem. But who else's? Gtk, pygtk, system-config-*? Fact is, a certain class of applications (Gtk? pygtk?) is unusable without fonts having been installed before, but there isn't an rpm-package dependency denoting this fact.
system-config-*, like most KDE and GNOME (and Qt, GTK+) applications, uses client side fonts via fontconfig/Xft. This requires that fonts must be installed and properly configured for Xft/fontconfig usage on the system that the application is running on (not the system the X server is running on). This is not a bug at all. You must not uninstall the fonts, or other dependencies of software, or you'll get software that does not work. Closing NOTABUG.
I could not disagree more. This is a package dependency problem. If these tools require a font or Xft, package dependencies must force users to have them installed, if these packages require other tools, appropriate package dependencies must be added.
(In reply to comment #2) > I could not disagree more. This is a package dependency problem. Fair enough. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the xorg-x11 package the bug is filed against though. I'm reassigning it to the "distribution" component. Someone else will review it and provide a second opinion, and reassign if appropriate. > If these tools require a font or Xft, package dependencies must force users to > have them installed, if these packages require other tools, appropriate package > dependencies must be added. That depends on wether or not the fonts are considered part of the base operating system or not. But again, that isn't something that is decided in the xorg-x11 packaging side of things, so someone else will determine that and make a distribution-level decision.
Perhaps it should be done at the toolkit level - since these tools are in pygtk, that would be gtk2. Alternatively, it could be drilled all the way back into the base X libraries.
I don't think package dependencies are the right means to protect against user stupidity like 1. uninstall all fonts 2. complain that no fonts show up
(In reply to comment #5) > I don't think package dependencies are the right means to protect against user > stupidity like > > 1. uninstall all fonts > 2. complain that no fonts show up I disagree. The point is: 'yum install system-config*' results into unusable 'system-config*'-tools, because fonts are missing.