Re: Running IceCat in a container

[Mike Gerwitz]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 21:25:19 -0500, Mike Gerwitz wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 17:30:42 +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> Perhaps you could define a package that simply runs “fc-cache” with the
>> fonts it has as inputs, and then pass that to ‘guix environment’.
>
> Oh, interesting; I wouldn't have thought of that.

Actually, I could use a little bit of help.

After hours of fontconf research and related stuff (more than I ever
cared to know), I think I'll be able to get away with running fc-cache
as you suggested using a package.

My ultimate goal I think is to still use the user's fonts, but I still
don't know a way to do that, since the /gnu symlinks are unavailable
within the container.[0] It _does_ work if the links are identical
between the host and cointainer---e.g. copying the font files into
~/.local/share/fonts, but that's obviously undesirable.

Unless you happen to know a good way to selectively expose those to a
container.

With that said, I'm having trouble creating a package: it wants a
`source' field, but this is a metapackage of sorts, and I didn't intend
on having any source files; I can generate them using the builder and
trivial-build-system.  How can I work around this?

Thanks.


[0]: What seems to be the case---which is probably obvious to anyone who
knows about this stuff---is that X11 on the host (since we're sharing
the socket) needs access to the font in addition to the software running
in the container.  I don't think this is the case for traditional X11
fonts (not using fontconf), but I'm not dealing with those.

-- 
Mike Gerwitz
Free Software Hacker+Activist | GNU Maintainer & Volunteer
GPG: D6E9 B930 028A 6C38 F43B  2388 FEF6 3574 5E6F 6D05
https://mikegerwitz.com

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