[Debian-in-workers] Draft for ttf-indic-fonts restructuring

[Vasudev Kamath]

Hi all,
I have asked for the opinions for renaming of ttf-indic-fonts before
on this list but with no reply (I got reply only from bubulle :)). So
this time I'm proposing a draft plan for renaming / restructuring of
ttf-indic-fonts.

pkg-fonts has a new policy (drafting in progress) for the font
packages for Wheezy. In short following are the main points
1. Fonts will be named as fonts-[foundry]-name, here foundry will be
name of author or company maintaining the font. After a long
discussion it was decided to make foundry as optional. so in short new
fonts will have name in the format fonts-name

2. deprecating defoma. Its decided to remove all the dependencies on
defoma (Debian font manager) in Wheezy.

I already have updated ttf-indic-fonts to follow 2nd policy and also
updated the packaging standards to dh7 (one line rules file).

Now coming to ttf-indic-fonts, its a meta package (multiple source in
single? or whatever I don't know how to describe it properly its
complex :)) and debian-in itself is the upstream!. But there are fonts
in the package which do have a valid upstream and have periodic
releases, and this is really painful for maintainer who needs to keep
track of individual fonts version and periodically check for updates!
If you don't believe me check this file in wsvn[1]. I had to manually
go to each font file to find its upstream and versions.

So here is my suggestion lets seperate out all the fonts with valid
upstream into their own source packages. Below is the fonts which do
have valid upstream
1. All the Lohit fonts (maintained by RedHat)
2. All Malayalam fonts except lohit (maintained by SMC)
3. Akar Gujarathi fonts (maintained by Kartik?)

I could recognise these 3 fonts if there are more fonts with proper
upstream please list them out here.

So here is the plan each individual lohit fonts for a language goes
to its own package say fonts-lohit-language? Suggestions are welcome.
At the top level there will be fonts-lohit meta package which depends
on all the individual fonts-lohit-language package. Please do comment
on this.

About fonts maintained by SMC: I think we can either have a single
package by name fonts-smc or do we need to package individual fonts
separately and have fonts-smc as meta package? (SMC members please
give your suggestions.)

Regarding Akar Gujarati fonts I'm not sure if its maintained by Kartik
so if its maintained by him, Kartik I request your suggestions :)

Now remains the fonts without proper upstream how do we deal with
them? I'm open for suggestions here.

Now 2 question arises
1. How do we handle installing of fontconfig xml files for each
language? (I'm talking about 90-ttf-language-fonts.conf).
2. How to deprecate the old packages aka ttf-indic-fonts and
ttf-language-fonts packages

For question 1 possible solution will be install fontconfig xml for
individual fonts for eg. fonts-lohit-kannada will install
90-fonts-lohit-kannada.conf? DD's please provide your suggestions

For question 2 I hope no other packages depends on ttf-indic-fonts but
still to be on safer side I thin we can follow the policy followed by
pkg-ruby-extras team i.e having transitional packages which will
depend on new packages and which can be slowly removed from debian
archive later.

Well this is my draft plan, lets start a discussion on this and once
everything is finalised we can start working on new packages.

[1] http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-in/ttf-indic-fonts/trunk/debian/README.Debian

PS: Please do reply to this mail I know its long but its important :)

Thanks and Regards
-- 
Vasudev Kamath
http://vasudevkamath.blogspot.com
http://identi.ca/vasudev
vasudev at joindiaspora.com (Ostatus)
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