I only need fonts for freetype-2 and libgd, not X. I tried removing the dependency on X from the ebuild, and emerge media-fonts/intlfonts almost completed, but quit when it couldn't find mkfontdir. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
Note, "emerge media-fonts/sharefonts" works ok without X.
It calls bdftopcf, which is part of x11 distribution, so it should fail if you do not have X installed. sharefonts doesn't compile pcf fonts so it doesn't need to depend on X (if you don't need X support). After you installed intlfonts you could remove X without breaking any dependency, but X is needed to compile intlfonts.
Could someone make an ebuild for *already* built fonts? They we could just download them, without having to emerge X, emerge intlfonts, unmerge X. Is this possible, or maybe too much data? I'm not familiar with bdftopcf or how big the output files are. I really need to get a second Gentoo computer to run tests on ... Thanks very much for the clear and excellent explanation.
we work from the upstream sources, if this is how they get delivered, then this is the way for us to go about them. In your situation you could create a binary package of the ebuild on a machine with x & use that to install it on the x-less machine. The x11 dep should be buildtime only.