While packaging up a mcclim application using sbcl's save-lisp-and-die, I've noticed an issue with font location handling. I think that the original intention was that the font functions in xrender-fonts.lisp merge the relative paths retrieved from *FAMILIES/FACES* with the user-supplied font-path variables at runtime. This works fine in the case of a system compiled on one system and running on another, since the path can be changed for the client user's system.

However, a load-op :after method in the .asd files tries to configure the pathnames automatically for a user's system -- and in the process turns the paths in *FAMILIES/FACES* to absolute ones, with the effect that font-path variables are ignored. The automatic configuration is probably fine (and extremely useful) for the majority of cases, but it might be an idea either to make it optional (other than commenting it out) or to fall back on trying a font-path variable if/when the MISSING-FONT error is raised.

For my purposes, #+nil solves the problem for now, and I'm not sure when I might have time to try to come up with a patch, but does anyone have an opinion on the best approach to this?

Thanks,

David Lewis