[Pkg-fonts-devel] Sponsoring a font package

[Nicolas Spalinger]

> Weytk,
> 
> Thanks Christian and Paul for your feedback.  I was told the best
> route to get this package in Ubuntu would be to have it included in
> Debian.


> I'll fix all of this and upload the fixed package to
> mentors.debian.net.  I guess I'll jo'-in the pkg-fonts team Christian.
>  I think Nicolas did suggest that, I joined the Ubuntu fonts team not
> the Debian team.  I am subscribed to the list.

You are very welcome on both team!
We certainly need motivated contributors like you :-)

Thanks for your efforts around this set of fonts!
As you've probably noticed, it takes time to get the packaging right. It 
seems there's always some extra little thing that's needed, and then 
Ubuntu has different expectations as upstream Debian but I'm confident 
that will your help these fonts will soon be a great enabler for many 
languages communities. There are experienced developers in this team and 
I'm pretty sure they will help.

I'll simply add a few suggestions to Paul and Christian's feedback:

- verifying that the metadata in the fonts is correct (seems like in the 
newer version the license field refers to GPL3 but misses the font 
exception)
- checking the versionning:  Aboriginal Serif REGULAR 943.ttf has a 
9.430 version field whereas Aboriginal\ Sans\ REGULAR\ 9433.ttf has 
9.443: I suggest asking the upstream designer why the font filenames 
have different versions than their metadata.
- you may consider adding a sample text or specimen image to show the 
capabilities of the fonts (and the beauty of the supported languages!)
- adding information about the Unicode coverage would be very useful 
since it's a rich font covering various blocks: in the FONTLOG ideally.
  - Adding the Vcs-* fields is also useful (like the others open fonts 
whose packaging is stored in http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-fonts/)

> I'm not sure about how upstream edits the fonts.  I'll have to ask
> upstream about this.  I renamed the fonts for looks. The original
> names had spaces in them so i replaced them with '-' and lowercased
> the letters.  When I do the upload I'll use the newer versions and
> keep the names as is.

Maybe you can also ask upstream to consider releasing fonts with no 
spaces in the name and with first capital letter and the rest lowercase?

> As far as making two different packages for Sans and Serif.  I think
> I'll work on just keeping it as one package.

I'd say that having different versions of the fonts may be a good reason 
to consider separate packages: ttf-lg-aboriginal-sans & 
ttf-lg-aboriginal-serif but it's up to you. You could do a source 
package which creates two binary packages.

> As far as the package name "aboriginal", it is the name of the font
> Aboriginal Sans and Aboriginal Serif.  I know it means different
> things in different places, but I think the name should stick with the
> font package and have a better description to make things clear that
> it is  specific to North American Indigenous Languages.

I agree with you. Since this is the name upstream has chosen, the 
package should reflect that. And as you say the description can explain 
what is intended.

Then you can add your current work to the team's svn repository:
http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-fonts/

I'll sent you a little diff against your debian/ folder.

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Spalinger
http://scripts.sil.org
http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org/
https://launchpad.net/people/fonts



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