Re: bug in gnustep-make / my last mail (pantomime)

[Jeff Teunissen]

Nicola Pero wrote:

> > it seems, that all works well. The packages are built on hppa as well
> > (although I couldn't run them yet).
> 
> Good
> 
> 
> > PS: The biggest problem is the Xserver crash now when building the
> > font cache.
> 
> Yes - I can see that - I don't like myself the proposed workaround :-)
> but actually I can't see much of a way out.  I'd consider it a bug in
> the Xlib interface - you can only get either a single font, or the whole
> list of all possible fonts (and getting the whole list of fonts often
> requires more memory than available).  What is missing is an interface
> to loop on all the available fonts, returning a reasonable number (1 or
> 2 or 10) each time.

It's not a bug in Xlib, it's a problem in the X server.

XFree86 will happily give you the ability to have an effectively-infinite
number of fonts, and most people have more fonts installed than can be
used simultaneously. The problem is an optimization -- the X server
doesn't load a font until an app asks for information that can't be gotten
from the XLFD list (xlsfonts doesn't crash the server).

What's more, the server doesn't unload fonts after you're done with them,
on the assumption that you'll need them later.

font_cacher has the effect of loading all available fonts into memory, but
the X server doesn't have enough memory available to actually perform
this. The inevitable result is a crash.

Looping through them one at a time wouldn't change the result.

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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