Monospace font bug?

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

I need some help to track down what may or may not be a distribution
bug.

When compiled with XFT, Emacs tries a default font named "monospace-12".
In Fontconfig, this is usually aliased to a font like DejaVu Sans Mono.
But some systems (Debian unstable?) seem to have a font actually named
Monospace, and Emacs then uses this font.  This font is somehow buggy:
in bug#505, the X server can't retrieve the font information, and in
bug#1219 it displays in a very fugly manner.

I don't know whether is is a distribution bug, or a common situation
that we need to cope with.

Could those of you running on GNU/Linux please try to do

  ~ $ xlsfonts *monospace*

And see if anything is returned?  For me, this gives

  xlsfonts: pattern "*monospace*" unmatched

but the people who've encountered problems do see fonts like

  -unknown-monospace-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-m-0-iso8859-1

In bug#505, this font was registered in

  /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType/fonts.dir

but there's no clue about where it came from.