[Debian-in-workers] Pending Changes todo for Package Maintainers

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting Kess Vargavind (vargavind at gmail.com):

> To me it seems Lohit-Assamese is simply Lohit-Bengali with two
> additional “glyphs”. And if I were upstream I would only keep one font

So, yes, that really pushes for the package being named
fonts-lohit-beng{-something}

At the moment, as upstream provides two different sources, maybe it's
better to have two different binary packages, though, really, your
parallel with two Latin languages is interesting.

Indeed, this thread shows that there are many misunderstandings when
it comes at fonts and scripts. Often scripts and languages are
confused together and we see fonts that claims to cover certain
languages just because they include some additionnal glyphs for a
given *script*.

It's more or less like having a font that would claim to support
French because it includes glyphs for Latin characters, plus
"âàéèëêiïîôûùÿ" and their uppercase counterparts (those are the only
accented letters we use) and another "supporting Danish" because it
includes å and ø needed for Danish but "useless" for French....except
for writing Danish names...:-)).

That would indeed be silly...but it seems to me that sometimes, this
is exactly what happens with fonts for some non-Latin languages. Here,
someone created an "Assamese" font that indeed has only two more
glyphs than the Bengali font (and a different style, admitedly, but
that has nothing to do with the Assamese language).

I have seen this many times for Arabic-script fonts, for instance.

Of course, in many cases, there are political|cultural reasons behind
this. It's really interesting to see how even Free Software
development can be polluted with political or cultural struggles. So,
let's not be polluted and let's use script names and codes.

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