Bug#941408: marked as pending in koules

[Stephen Kitt]

On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 10:46:03 +0100, Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 05 Oct 2019 at 11:02:00 +0200, Stephen Kitt wrote:
> > It’s not ideal, since the dependency isn’t strong, but
> > policy says packages can’t depend on font packages — which makes sense in
> > X since the fonts can be served remotely. (See
> > https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-depends-on-an-x-font-package.html
> > for details.)  
> 
> Does this recommendation still make sense? It certainly *used to be*
> the case that font rendering (and a lot of other rendering) was done
> server-side on the X server, possibly with fonts served by a remote
> font server like the xfstt package; but my understanding is that this
> decade, toolkits like GTK and Qt normally do their rendering locally
> and are responsible for loading their own fonts, mostly via fontconfig
> and freetype.

Right, it probably doesn’t make much sense any more. Ironically, the
situation is better now than it was a few years ago when X font servers
stopped being popular and before fontconfit and Freetype became commonplace:
with the latter, there are fallbacks which usually work reasonably well (at
least, well enough to get some text on the screen), whereas X programs which
ask for a specific font (such as Koules here) typically break if the X server
doesn’t have the font...

I’ll open a bug against policy.

Regards,

Stephen
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