Bugzilla Bug 260335

Suggestion to drop media-fonts/font-adobe-* from xorg-server dependencies if
possible.
These packages provide bitmap fonts for various unfortunately popular font
families like Courier and Sans. Unfortunately, because being bitmap fonts -
they look particularly ugly - and unfortunately it's default first user
experience before switching to truetype fonts (media-fonts/corefonts or
media-fonts/dejavu - that provide Sans and Courier family substitutes).

Apart from:
* drop media-fonts/font-adobe-* from xorg-server

there are possible solutions
* add
|| (
   media-fonts/corefonts
   media-fonts/dejavu
)
in RDEPEND instead
corefonts being default as it provides Sans and Courier (as most widely used)
families without any font aliases required.
Of course one can choose dejavu as well, I'm not qualified to advocate here.

It could be possible as well to make truetype fonts installation optional,
controlled by 'truetype' USE flag in xorg-server (maybe to make freetype
support optional in X server as well?)

I guess some packages with ancient/custom widget toolkit (emacs, Tk, Motif) may
suffer from such default setup, but it could be solved by either adding font
dependencies there or ewarn in pkg_postinst.

Currently, full-blown DE's suffer from lack of out-of-the-box true type font
presence, and for KDE4 at least truetype font dependencies has been explicitly
added.

Maybe some better ideas?

This is indeed a good suggestion. I'll try to revisit the issue once 1.5.3 is
stable as there's no immediate need to change this and I don't want to further
delay the stabilization.

Feel free to experiment on your own for now and to report back here. I'll
gladly help you out if you have any questions.

Thanks

1.5.3-r2 only has 1 font package in its dependencies:
media-fonts/font-adobe-75dpi. 1.6.0 has dropped that, in the x11 overlay. I
consider this fixed already.

Hmm, what about truetype fonts? Leave it up to DE's to pull them (as of now
apparently) or maybe add truetype IUSE to xorg-server ebuild in RDEPEND,
something like

truetype? (
  || (
    media-fonts/corefonts
    media-fonts/dejavu
  }
}

or similar combination to provide most widely used and most popular truetype
fonts for use with any DE?
(if not, there should be some announcement on gentoo-desktop ml telling to take
care of base true type fonts installation so that users won't end up without
any fonts on clean install some day)

regards

xorg-server purposely pulls in the minimum packages necessary to run X. If you
want a more full-featured install, you use xorg-x11 instead.