Alan Coopersmith wrote: > http://behdad.org/text/ describes the current state of text & font handling > in the open source desktop world and work being done in various quarters to > improve it. > > One of the projects mentioned is: > > Automatic font installation: Building on top of the previous > feature, this feature involves automatic detection of missing fonts, > and installing them. Minimal changes in the text stack were > required. The main changes were in RPM and PackageKit. The way this > works is: > > 1. When building packages, RPM detects fonts, > > 2. For each font, RPM uses fontconfig's new fc-query tool and > FcPatternFormat() to build a list of "Provides" tags for the > list. For example, the Deja Vu Sans font will "provide" the tags > "font(:lang=en)" as well as "font(dejavusans)" among others, > > 3. packagekit-gnome installs a system-wide GTK+ module to be loaded > by all GTK+ applications, > > 4. The PackageKit GTK+ module overrides the default Pango fontmap > such that when a font is requested but not found, a message is send > to the PackageKit daemon, > > 5. Upon receiving such messages, the PackageKit daemon searches the > package database for the requested font tag, and shows a dialog > asking user for permission, and showing a list of font packages > available that fulfill the request, > > 6. When the new font is installed, running applications pick it up > automatically, no need to message them back. > > Should we be doing something similar for the OpenSolaris desktop using IPS? > (fc-query is in the version of fontconfig we ship, but is missing from our > packages - I'll fix that.) >
Interesting... I like the tagging model for packages. Do we need the same kind of mechanism for other things besides fonts? It seems as if we could also use the shell completion functions to suggest packages to be installed if commands aren't found... this would also be useful in non-gui environments. - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts "You will contribute more with mercurial than with thunderbird."
