3 ms·

The post doesn't solve the mystry for me - Why did 32 bit time cause in Steam picking that specific font?

• eqvinox 4y ago
  fontconfig is the library responsible for indexing and looking up fonts (e.g. by name - note that most software doesn't specify fonts by file name but rather by font name) If fontconfig fails to stat() a font file, it presumably aborts trying to record any information about that font file. Notably, it doesn't know what the font file's actual font name is. If all fonts fail due to stat(), no information will be available about any font. fontconfig has multiple levels of fallback (e.g. "similar" fonts first), but in this case since nothing is known about any font you just get whatever font happens to be first in the list of all fonts.
  • db48x 4y ago
    Or possibly you just get whatever font _didn’t_ have an atime too far in the future. Of course, now that you have actually opened and read the file, you will have changed the atime and thus might have made it unavailable the next time you run Steam. Honestly, everyone should run their filesystems with the `noatime` option set, so that they never record access times at all. We very rarely care about when files are accessed. Usually we care most about when a file was last _modified_, the mtime, so this loses us almost nothing and saves a huge amount of writes to the filesystem at the same time.
    • ux 4y ago
      It's funny because I'm actually actively using the atime: when I need to know what's the last video file I watched in a series, I use `ls -ult [--time-style=full-iso]` or `stat -c '%x %n' *.mkv | sort -r` to show files by order of access time: last accessed (played) will appear first.
      • db48x 4y ago
        I usually just go back to my shell and press up :) atimes aren’t completely useless, just useful less often than mtimes.