GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 86150
Inability to even log in if your Xft is broken
Last modified: 2006-02-02 11:31:45 UTC
If you happen to have a broken Xft (as I did; Keith has since fixed this bug), Gnome logs you in, but the panel crashes if it cannot find any fonts. You may get (in your .xsession-errors file, or say, from gnome-font-properties) complaints that it can't find any fonts. The panel eventually exists; various other apps have similar behavior. If no client side fonts can be found, we'd have a much more robust system that would not fail in a completely obscure way (I end up with a completely blank screen!) if it would fail back to core fonts. This problem could occur other other circumstances, like messed up XftConfig files, I suspect.
Jim: did we decide that this is a gtk bug?
It's a Pango RFE. I wouldn't call it a bug. (Pointing Xft at a particular file turns out to work less than perfectly so it will take some work.) There are various other Pango bugs which are sitting on 1.2 or future milestones with "the only way to do better is to ship a font with Pango" so its sort of a dup of that.
*** Bug 70351 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 121069 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 83871 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 111471 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Dropping priority since no dups have been received for quite a while.
I'm going to close this, since with my recent changes in CVS, Xft, Cairo, and FT2 backends won't crash anymore. They will just render a lot of empty boxes instead. Not really useful, but better than crashing. We will wait for cairo to ship with an internal font, to do something better...