Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!usc!ucsd!ucbvax!THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM!nsb
From: nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: Problem with LINKINSTALL_ENV
Message-ID: <8b0Ts7O0M2YtA9_49l@thumper.bellcore.com>
Date: 27 Sep 90 13:26:31 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 21

This isn't really exactly an Andrew bug, but it is a genuine problem
that occurs when you're using LINKINSTALL_ENV and you have certain kinds
of X terminals.  The problem stems from the fact that some X terminals,
at least, can't (or won't) follow symbolic links when obtaining fonts
from NFS.   Therefore it is actually necessary to point them to a single
directory where all the fonts reside.  Naturally, this means
LINKINSTALL_ENV causes problems on the fonts.

The easy fix for me was to just copy all the fonts to a single
directory.  Figuring out the problem & solution, however, was not so
obvious.  My suggestion is that a new installation variable be added,
e.g. LINKINSTALLFONTS_ENV, that can easily permit LINKINSTALL_ENV to be
used for everything *except* font installation.   

The reason I don't just completely shrug this off as a bug in the X
terminal is that I've heard that it is considered, by some terminal
manufacturers, to be some sort of security-related feature, and though
this strikes me as really lame, it does suggest that they might not be
planning to ever fix the problem...

Cheers.  -- Nathaniel