[Fontconfig] Regularizing contains operator semantics

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2003-07-11 at 16:54, Keith Packard wrote:

> LISTING FONTS
> 
> When listing fonts, contains should have "obvious" semantics, I suggest
> that those semantics depend on the type of the value:
> 
> 	string, number, boolean:
> 
> font has an equal value for every value in the pattern.  This means
> that using 'times,courier' for the family will result in no fonts
> being listed as no font has both times and courier family names.  In fact, I
> can't see a good use for multiple values here as it would require multiple
> values in the fonts; let's see if that is broken.  For strings, the change
> here is that 'contains' does not mean sub string -- list 'courier' and you
> won't see 'courier 10 pitch'.  I think strings should be treated as atomic
> values in this context; fontconfig doesn't have string operators, which
> is at least consistent.

What you are saying in this mail generally makes sense, but when
I get down to details I get a little confused, especially about
the interpretation of multiple values - when a key is referred
to as having the value "foo,bar", there are three possible
interpretations of that:

 * A string containing an embedded comma
 * A pattern with multiple values with the same key
 * A pattern with a single value with a composite type (LangSet)

When reading through your mail, I had some trouble figuring out
when each of these interpretations was applicable in what context,
and in fact, it's not always clear to me in practice using fontconfig
either. If I do:

   fc-list times,courier

I assume that the resulting pattern has to FC_FAMILY elements, one
for times, and one for courier. 

But then I don't see how your proposed changes section:

> 1)      Use a Contains-alike operator for LISTING which does exact
>        matching for strings, permit Contains for EDITING to do
>        substring matching

Is going to result in going from the current result:

 List both fonts with a family of Times and those with a family
 of Courier

to the behavior described above.

Regards,
						Owen