From Fedora Project Wiki

Fontconfig 2.10

Summary

Update fontconfig package to 2.10.

Owner

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 18
  • Last updated: 2012-07-31
  • Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description

The new release always contains a lot of bug fixes and improvements. that would be a good idea to ship it in Fedora as well to make our fonts handling better. this feature would also helps to keep it on track since fontconfig package is in the critical path.

Benefit to Fedora

Since we've missed 2.9 in Fedora 17 due to its release date and our schedule, there are a lot of things for our benefits though, the summary that particularly what we may be interesting are:

  • More languages supports and updates (Austrian, Bodo, Dogri, Kashmiri, Maniputi, Nepali, N'ko, Santali, Uighur, Urdu)
  • Performance improvements
  • Memory leaks fixes
  • Better font selection without the language notation
  • FHS friendly installation path
  • XDG Base Directory Specification support
  • Unicode 6.1 support
  • Stability
  • Better documents
  • and more features and bug fixes!

Scope

The library is still compatible with the older release. so no need to rebuild packages being linked against fontconfig. some font packages needs to be updated to make their own fontconfig config files sane.

How To Test

See if the font selection is expected result in the desktops and the applications. also $HOME/{.fonts.conf,.d}, $HOME/.config/fontconfig/{fonts.conf,conf.d} works. fonts-tweak-tool may helps for that testing.

User Experience

There are not too much that the users will be noticeable though, easier to see may be:

  • fc-match gives better result without :lang=something
  • $HOME/.fonts.conf and $HOME/.fonts.conf.d is deprecated now. they are encouraged to use $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf and $HOME/.config/fontconfig/conf.d.
  • The config files not enabled by default has been moved to /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail now.

Dependencies

Here is the list of bugs that fonts packages needs to be updated for 2.10.

Contingency Plan

Revert to the previous version we shipped, with bumping the epoch.

Documentation

No documentation available so far. but it will be there once new version is released: http://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/release/ChangeLog-2.10.0 and http://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/release/ChangeLog-2.9.0

Release Notes

$HOME/.fonts.conf and $HOME/.fonts.conf.d is deprecated now. Fontconfig 2.10 still reads it though, the recommended corresponding paths are:

  • $HOME/.fonts.conf -> $HOME/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
  • $HOME/.fonts.conf.d -> $HOME/.config/fontconfig/conf.d

We encourage you to move them to the appropriate places.

Also the config files that not enabled by default has been moved to /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail now. if you have any symbolic-links from the old place /etc/fonts/conf.avail, please update.

Comments and Discussion