So, up till now fonts in Debian were supposed to be installed via Defoma. Defoma has worked fairly well, but it's Debian-specific, and very complex.
Now however we have fontconfig, which is a more generic way for applications to find and use fonts. Besides core components like GNOME, KDE, and Mozilla, other applications like magicpoint are now using it as well. I think we should encourage this. Defoma is not really supported by its maintainer anymore (see #180188), and I think that we should be moving away from using Defoma, and encouraging upstreams to support fontconfig. They are not entirely duplicates really; Defoma as I understand it is just kind of a trigger mechanism, and can help non-fontconfig applications to support a variety of fonts. Now, to the issue at hand: after installing a font package, fc-cache must be rerun. Now, we could continue to use Defoma, and I could have fontconfig install some sort of Defoma trigger to make Defoma rerun fc-cache. But given the above, I would prefer for font packages to just invoke fc-cache directly in their postinst, and also for them to Depend on fontconfig. This should solve #175797. The exact code that packages should use might look something like this: printf "Regenerating fonts cache..." HOME=/root fc-cache -f -v 1>/var/log/fontconfig.log 2>&1 || (printf "failed; see /var/log/fontconfig.log for more information\n"; exit 1) printf "done.\n" Maybe I could put this into a little shell script in the Debian fontconfig package. Comments?
