Death to xfs

That's xfs the X font server, I have no beef with the xfs filesystem. We've been using xfs for core fonts[1] since Red Hat 6, mainly because we've had the chkfontpath tool for editing the xfs config file and restarting xfs. This tool lets us add and remove new font directories to the xfs config file and restarts xfs when necessary, so that a running X server will pick up new fonts as new font packages are installed.

While all that is nice, it's a pretty weak reason for running an system daemon, considering the maintenance overhead, security problems and boot time slowdown. So to get the best of both worlds, I wrote a patch to libXfont (which is what xfs and the X server uses for locating and rendering fonts) to let it pick up fonts paths in a rc.d style way. Instead of relying on a config file for the font path, you can now additionally redirect to a directory of symlinks, such as /etc/X11/fontpath.d. The symlinks point to the directories that make up the font path and the symlink names can include attributes such as :unscsaled. libXfont will automatically detect when links are added and removed and rescan the directory.

No, core fonts are not going away. We can't ever do that, to much legacy. But since Fedora have the two required core fonts ("misc" and "cursor") compiled into the X server, you can have a usable setup with no core fonts (say, maybe you don't like bitmap fonts, or maybe you're OLPC), no xfs, no chkfontpath installed. And at the same time, if you must have that belowed bitmap courier in your terminal or are stuck with an old motif app, install the core font you need and it will just work.

[1] Core fonts is the font mechanism originally designed into the X server. The X server locates and renders the fonts on behalf of the client. This requires the X server to know about parsing font files, glyph rendering and arbitrary encodings, which you typically would want to keep out of a priviledged process. Modern applications locate fonts using fontconfig, render glyphs using freetype, and only upload the resulting images to the RENDER extension.