I compiled wayland 1.14.0, wayland-protocols-1.12 and weston-3.0.0. weston-launch used to work. Then i don't know what happened, probably I installed the Noto fonts, and starting as non-root `weston-launch` now doesn't display a clock or any text, but on the upper left side of the window there is a terminal icon. When I move the pointer over terminal icon, it shows a hint - rectangle where one letter would fit, but the rectangle contains no text. When I click on the terminal icon nothing happens. When I start weston-launch as root, the clock on the right is shown, the hint over the terminal icon is displayed and I can start the terminal. Last week however, probably before upgrading freetype and fontconfig, weston-launch displayed rectangles as placeholders for the clock. Could you advise me, why as non-root weston-launch does not display text? Fontconfig has nothing special for root, fc-list |nl displays as root and non-root 1656 fonts.
Could you try comparing the environment variables between the working and non-working weston (not weston-launch) processes? You should be able to find it in /proc/<pid>/environ. I do not recall any changes to the font handling the weston repository in years, so I do suspect it to be a local configuration issue. FWIW, I think the Weston UI uses the Cairo "toy api" for text, which might have a problem as well. The font to search for is hardcoded to "sans" in the Weston clients/ sources, so if that no longer matches anything, I suppose it could lead to what you describe.
The font files were not readable at OS-level by mortals.
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