[Pkg-fonts-devel] New release: GNU FreeFont

[Christian Perrier]

Quoting Steve White (stevan.white at googlemail.com):

> You don't insist on building all your jpegs and png files from source
> (I think).  Why do you insist on building ttf files?


For instance to be able to have our source packages use patches such as
the various ones you could use when you took ttf-freefont over?

Debian is committed to its users' needs. One of these is one the
building stones of Free Software: be able to modify the source code
and adapt it to one's own needs.

By offering our users the easiest possibility to modify the font
packages we provide, we're respecting that item of the Debian social
contract: we are committed to our users and free software.

By doing that, we also comply to a commitment by Debian maintainers,
contribute back our improvements to upstream developers.

Speaking about TTF files, you're actually hit one of the weaknesses of
many of our font packages: many of them are just providing random TTF
files which our users can't modify themselves...

Providing TTF files that are buildable at package compilation time is
not a requirement by the Debian policy. There's actually a grey line
here and many Debian ttf-* packages are just what you suggest: random
collection of unmodifiable TTF files. But *those* are the ones that
need to be changed...not the packages that already allow font
modifications such as ttf-freefont or ttf-dejavu (and many others
maintained by the pkg-fonts team now).


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