bug#24279: Bug in xterm and/or fontconfig

[Mark H Weaver]

Alex Kost <address@hidden> writes:

> John Darrington (2016-08-21 16:18 +0300) wrote:
>
>> In GuixSD:
>>
>> guix package -i xterm strace
>> strace xterm
>>
>> xterm starts as it should,  however observe many failed calls similar to:
>>  
>> open("/gnu/store/b484nvn9nnr3ddclpz2fma9yxmimg2jj-fontconfig-2.11.94/lib/libXdmcp.so.6",
>> O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
>>
>>
>> Now in the xterm, hold down Ctrl and press any mouse button.
>> The xterm aborts with the following messages:
>>  Warning: Unable to load any usable ISO8859 font
>>  Error: Aborting: no font found
>
> Pressing Ctrl with any mouse button displays menus for me without any
> error.

Fwiw, I see the same problem with 'xterm' on both of my GuixSD laptops,
on mips64el and i686.  The i686 laptop is running a full GNOME desktop
environment, and the mips64el laptop runs a somewhat minified Xfce
environment.

I remember that 'xterm' worked for me in the past, and specifically that
the pop-up menus raised by Ctrl-clicks worked, on both of these
machines.  However, at some point in the distant past I switched to
gnome-terminal, so I'm not sure when 'xterm' became broken.

       Mark