W Knight <whk@umbisag.org> writes:

> Summary: 
> After doing a guix pull; sudo guix system reconfigure /etc/config.scm on a fresh 1.1.0 install via iso the default font for all xfce displays breaks. Each character in menu, applications, and terminals is a box with four dots (no character available). 
> If I switch from generation 2 (reconfigure) to generation 1 (iso) fonts work again. 
>
> Workaround: manually adding fonts-dejavu to /etc/config.scm packages and reconfiguring fixes issue 

This roots in the fact that Pango (the font rendering library used by
GTK+) no longer supports bitmap fonts:

  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/issues/386

We should probably provide a default font in %base-packages to work
around this problem, or graft TrueType/OpenType fonts onto the
'gs-fonts' package which is available to most applications (but
unfortunately only contains bitmap fonts..).

I don't have a clear idea of what a proper solution here would be,
feedback wanted.