FS#54812 - [urxvt] does not start when configured to use ISO-8859 in combination with terminus

Attached to Project: Community Packages
Opened by Julian Orth (mahkoh) - Friday, 14 July 2017, 21:27 GMT
Last edited by Toolybird (Toolybird) - Tuesday, 04 April 2023, 06:51 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages
Status Closed
Assigned To Levente Polyak (anthraxx)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Upstream changed the compilation process in 4.46 to no longer install the iso8859 variants by default. Users of these variants might be left unable to open a terminal emulator. Many wiki pages related to font configuration use iso8859 variants in their examples.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Install urxvt
2. Add the following line to `~/.Xdefaults`: `URxvt*font : -xos4-terminus-medium-*-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*`
3. Try to start urxvt

Expected result:

urxvt starts

Actual result:

urxvt does not start
This task depends upon

Closed by  Toolybird (Toolybird)
Tuesday, 04 April 2023, 06:51 GMT
Reason for closing:  None
Additional comments about closing:  This is a very old and stale ticket. Please request a reopen if the issue is still a problem (and reproducible).
Comment by Alexander F. Rødseth (xyproto) - Tuesday, 18 July 2017, 15:05 GMT
If upstream desides to remove support for ISO-8859, I will not add it. It's not the Arch Way.

I'm also strongly against ISO-8859 and in favor of UTF-8. If the wiki uses ISO-8859 for examples instead of UTF-8, I think the examples should be updated.

Are there any technical reasons for why ISO-8859 support should be added?
Comment by Julian Orth (mahkoh) - Tuesday, 18 July 2017, 17:38 GMT
>If upstream desides to remove support for ISO-8859, I will not add it.

I do not believe upstream has done this. See the release notes on http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net:

>The X11 8-bit code pages are not installed by default.

--

>If the wiki uses ISO-8859 for examples instead of UTF-8, I think the examples should be updated.

Those examples do not necessarily use terminus. One would have to check if those fonts support anything but 8859. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?search=iso8859

>Are there any technical reasons for why ISO-8859 support should be added?

Normally I would not say so, but urxvt has the annoying behavior of simply failing to start if the configured font is not available. It does print a message to stderr but you won't see it if you start urxvt from X. To fix the problem you'll have to first figure out what's going on and then edit .Xdefaults from a virtual console. And then you still have to figure out where your font went. It took me some time to remember that I had to use xfontsel to generate the font specification.
Comment by Alexander F. Rødseth (xyproto) - Tuesday, 18 July 2017, 22:27 GMT
Thanks for the thoughtful answers, I will look into it. I also use urxvt.
Comment by Alexander F. Rødseth (xyproto) - Wednesday, 19 July 2017, 12:55 GMT
Looking at the README that comes with terminus-font and the installation procedure used in the PKGBUILD file (https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/plain/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/terminus-font), I see that "./configure" receives a few options and "make install" is used to install the files.

To me, it looks like the Arch Linux package uses the files provided by upstream and then installs them in a very standard way, just like upstream intended.

I don't see any contradiction to this in the release notes at http://terminus-font.sourceforge.net.

If there are problems with urxvt in relation to font configuration, I think that sounds like a problem with urxvt.

Or have I missed or overlooked something here?
Comment by Ciriaco Garcia de Celis (cgarcia) - Saturday, 29 July 2017, 02:43 GMT
I also can't use urxvt with terminus font after the upgrade. It reports "unable to load base fontset". I agree I was using iso8859, but anyway xfontsel doesn't allow to select utf ("uni"? ... it is grayed out).
Comment by Ciriaco Garcia de Celis (cgarcia) - Saturday, 29 July 2017, 03:01 GMT
I finally managed to get it work... I didn't know iso10646 was UTF. Replacing 8859 by 10646 and appending "-*" to my previous definitions all is Ok again.

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