30-aliases-fedora.conf should be split so new font packages declaring helvetica/arial... aliases can be added in Fedora without requiring changes in the main fontconfig package
Yep. This is a bit hard though. I'll give it a shot in a few weeks after F7 is out.
The cost of this btw is that fontconfig has to read more files at startup.
However, for fonts Fedora ship in their own package, you can move the relevant files in the font package itself, so the average Fedora desktop (which does not have every possible font package installed) will have less fontconfig rules to process overall. But sure, it's a balancing act and flexibility has a cost.
Note however that not all parts of font-specific stuff can go into font packages. When a user asks for font A and you don't have it installed, you want to know whether you should substitute a sans or sans-serif (or monospace fwiw) for it. That means, some installed configuration should talk about font A. I'm inclined to just clean up the current fedora confs and send them for upstream fontconfig inclusion.
I was not suggesting to remove arial aliasing if arial is not on-system, I was suggesting to move rules that say replace A with B to B package as they're useless if B is not on-system
Based on the date this bug was created, it appears to have been reported against rawhide during the development of a Fedora release that is no longer maintained. In order to refocus our efforts as a project we are flagging all of the open bugs for releases which are no longer maintained. If this bug remains in NEEDINFO thirty (30) days from now, we will automatically close it. If you can reproduce this bug in a maintained Fedora version (7, 8, or rawhide), please change this bug to the respective version and change the status to ASSIGNED. (If you're unable to change the bug's version or status, add a comment to the bug and someone will change it for you.) Thanks for your help, and we apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point. The process we're following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp We will be following the process here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping to ensure this doesn't happen again.
IMHO that's up to Behdad to decide how we move on from now. We've progressed quite a bit since the bug was opened, but we could do more if there is a will to
Behdad - What do you want to do from here? Moving this to F10Target for now, feel free to remove if not going to happen
That file has been moved to upstream in fontconfig 2.5. And no, it can't be easily split.