[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#580595: Bug#580595: xfdesktop4: Selection of default font not always honored

[Yves-Alexis Perez]

On jeu., 2010-05-06 at 21:18 -0400, Dave Witbrodt wrote:
> 
> After selecting Applications->Settings->Appearance, and modifying the
> "Default Font" on the Fonts tab, I have been using Liberation Sans
> (11 pt) as my default font.
> 
> Occasionally, after logging out and back in, Xfce starts up without
> honoring this selection of default font.  (This has never yet happened
> when first booting the machine, but only after logging out and back in.)
> Some other font with a much smaller point size -- maybe the default for
> Xfce if no config files are present in $HOME -- is sometimes used.

Is it a different *font* or only a different size? The only settings I
know about xfdesktop font settings is the size, so it'd help if we know
if it fallbacks to a whole different font or just the font size.

> If I
> right-click, select Desktop Settings, click the Icons tab, then check
> and uncheck the "Use custom font size" checkbox, Xfce realizes that it
> is supposed to be using Liberation Sans.  (That checkbox defaults to 12
> pt, but when I uncheck it I get the desired Liberation Sans 11 pt.)

So at first, the checkbox is unchecked (but xfdesktop doesn't use
correct font settings), when you check it the *font* changes and when
you uncheck it the *size* changes, to switch back to the correct
settings (the ones chosen in xfce4-settings-manager).

> This is merely an annoying, but obviously something is not working the
> way it should and I thought I should report it as a bug.  It is a great
> mystery to me that my custom "default font" setting is always respected
> the first time I log in, but randomly fails to be recognized if I log
> out and back in again!

I have to admit I don't use much desktop icons, so I've never reproduced
that, but I'll try, stay tuned.
> 
> I wasn't sure whether to file this against 'xfdesktop4' or
> 'xfce4-settings', so I made the best guess I could.  How can a user know
> which Xfce package to file a bug against, with it split up into so many
> separate pieces?  (For example, there are missing icons in the
> applications menu, and also in the dialog box when moving files from one
> drive to another.  Are these bugs in Xfce packages, or the icon theme
> package?)

We try very hard to stay modular and avoir too much dependencies and
monolithism. So yeah, that's the price, components talk to each other
and sometime it's hard to say where does the problem lies. Just try to
guess good, and report, then we'll figure out ourselves and reassign if
needed. In that case, I think the potential problem lies in xfdesktop.
> 

Something which might help is, when outside of Xfce, if you could try to
check ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-desktop.xml to
see the current setting of 'use-custom-font-size'. What we need would be
to check that setting when you know that, just after that, the bug will
trigger, but that might be a bit tricky.

Cheers,
-- 
Yves-Alexis
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