Bug#1064068: font-manager shows the older version of two versions of the same font and prints “Fontconfig error: No writable cache directories” on the console

[Al Ma]

Package: fontconfig
Version: 2.14.1-4
Control: affects -1 font-manager
For the purpose of this bug report, let's assume you have two versions of the same font, say, Courier New (the real name is probably irrelevant, as we only need the same name):
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/cour.ttf
/usr/local/share/fonts/link_to_a_directory_on_a_nonroot_drive/cour.ttf
The tool gnome-font-viewer reports v2.82 for the first font file and a larger version for the second font file. The tool font-manager reports also v2.82 for Courier New. So a file with a larger version is ignored. This is not good and should be improved: whenever two versions of the same font are available, the larger one should be taken.
Upon starting the font-manager, we see 4 equal lines “Fontconfig error: No writable cache directories” on the console without further information.
Running
# fc-cache -r && fc-cache -fv && dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig fontconfig-cache
font-manager didn't help, and /var/log/syslog and dmesg show, subjectively, nothing of interest for this bug report.
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