Hi guys, Lets meet Monday June 9th 17:00 UTC in ##fonts on freenode to discuss font autoinstallation in Fedora. I''ve recently committed patches to GTK+ and gnome-settings-daemon (the latter not committed just yet, but expect to commit today or tomorrow) to detect fontconfig configuration changes and react to it [1]. By react, I mean: - Make fontconfig reread its configuration, seeing newly installed fonts, changed configs, etc, - Make Pango fontmap drop its fontset caches, - Redraw all widgets. With these in place, you can install a font rpm and all running applications will pick it up withing 5 seconds. Next logical step is to detect when fonts are missing for some language, and let PackageKit offer installing them. That''s what I want to discuss at the meeting. To get us started, this is the very rough design I have in mind right now: - Hook into PangoFcFontMap''s load_fontset method, and if the font pattern for the first font in the just-loaded fontset does not cover the asked language, signal missing fonts for language. - The signal will be propagated to PackageKit over D-BUS - PackageKit will show a notification suggesting to install fonts for langauge. In a further dialog it will list all font packages covering the missing language(s?) and let user choose which ones to install. Discussion: - I don''t like making Pango do much. My previous idea was to add a missing-fonts hook in Pango that another module can hook into. I don''t like that idea much now. Hooks are in general very unscalable in the long run. - Here''s another way to handle it: I''m going to make some changes to PangoFontMap handling. The part relevant here is that one can call pango_cairo_font_map_set_default() to change the default font map. Then: - PackageKit-gnome will install a gtk-module that upon loading, gets the current pangocairo defaultfontmap, subclasses it anonymously (that''s perfectly possible), overrides the load_fontset method, creates an instance of it, and sets it as the new default pangocairo fontmap. - The hook then is responsible for using D-BUS or any other means (xsettings?!) to notify PackageKit of missing fonts and at that point I''m done :). For this to work, it''s easiest if font packages provided names like font-lang-fa, font-lang-fa_IR, font-lang-az_IR, etc. We can develop a script to automatically generate that at package build time. Fontconfig already has that list. Anyway, further discussion during the meeting :). Cheers, behdad [1] http://mces.blogspot.com/2008/06/online-font-installation.html