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.
