The bitstream-vera-fonts packages were recently given fontconfig config snippets with a precedence of 50. Trouble is, this seems to override customizations in local.conf, because the snippet that loads local.conf has precedence 51. So even though I had this in local.conf:

        <alias>
                <family>sans-serif</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>Cantarell</family>
                        <family>Droid Sans</family>
                        <family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
                        <family>DejaVu Sans</family>
                        <family>Verdana</family>
                        <family>Arial</family>
                        <family>Albany AMT</family>
                        <family>Luxi Sans</family>
                        <family>Nimbus Sans L</family>
                        <family>Helvetica</family>
                        <family>Lucida Sans Unicode</family>
                        <family>BPG Glaho International</family> <!-- lat,cyr,arab,geor -->
                        <family>Tahoma</family> <!-- lat,cyr,greek,heb,arab,thai -->
                </prefer>
        </alias>

I was getting this from fontconfig:

[root@adam conf.d]# fc-match "sans"
Vera.ttf: "Bitstream Vera Sans" "Regular"

because 50-bitstream-vera-sans-fonts.conf has this:

  <alias>
    <family>sans-serif</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>

if I moved 50-bitstream-vera-sans-fonts.conf to 52-bitstream-vera-sans-fonts.conf , and ran fc-cache, fontconfig would give me Cantarell.

I've now just replaced my local.conf with a 10- precedence config snippet, but still this seems wrong, I think maybe that specific <family><prefer> bit should be split out into a file with 60ish precedence?