Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 03:54:48PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> 
> > It will suck completely - it breaks i18n among other things because Vera
> > isn't suitable for all languages. But also it means gnome apps and other
> > apps don't have the same default font.
> > 
> > The default font is "sans-serif" period, and always will be.  If people
> > want default sans font to be Vera, they need to configure fontconfig as
> > such. fontconfig could come that way out of the box, that might be nice.
> 
> So this is another "unsolvable above the distro level" problem... Great. :)
> 

Well, it's solvable in fontconfig. ;-) Just find keithp on #gtk+ and
complain a bit.

As a tangent, IMO many of our current end-user-impacting issues are
going to require working outside of GNOME in order to address
them. There are many issues about hardware, system configuration,
general system integration, that are some of the highest-priority
issues in terms of a desktop system. Not to mention the usability
nightmare that is multiple MIME systems or font systems.

However the wrong solution to that is to try to make GNOME into an
entire operating system - we have our hands full already. ;-)
fontconfig is an example of the One True Way, which is to build real
infrastructure that can come to be standard across distributions and
application frameworks.

I'm hoping D-BUS in system message bus daemon mode will help out here
- I want to hook it up to hotplug so that you get notifications such
as "USB device attached", and distribute all the hotplug setup as a
separate tarball that works out-of-the-box, if possible. Then
hopefully we can get it adopted for various operating systems and
GNOME can simply rely on having a way to get hardware notifications
and whatever else we can think of from the OS.

This means finally a way to get a dialog box, even one that requires a
response, from the kernel out to userspace then out to a particular
user's X session - woo-hoo! "I don't recognize your new device - is it
a camera or an mp3 player? Should I put an icon for it on the
desktop?"

Havoc