[Pkg-fonts-devel] RFC: Planning an Intial Font Policy

[Nicolas Spalinger]

[...]

>> * Should we compile the fonts from the sources by default, whenever they
>>  have their sources available, under normal circumstances?
> 
> In certain circumstances the license may prevent this (SIL OFL +
> reserved font name). I think we should encourage building but document
> that particular caveat (and any others that arise).

Recreating a full build path is really taking all the responsibility for
the quality of the final rendering, Unicode coverage and behaviours and
especially for any regressions introduced by a system not used by
upstream authors. Regardless of their chosen licensing and where authors
prefer to place their creation on the libre/open font licensing spectrum.

The renaming clauses and artistic integrity mechanisms are specifically
there to prevent half-baked rebuilds being passed on as the upstream
software, creating chaos in the namespace and causing pain to users.
With great branching freedom comes great responsibility not to mess up
the upstream's work and confuse users.

Whenever there is a fully reproducible buildpath using only software in
Debian main and we can *guarantee* its quality, then yes certainly. But
realistically we're not there yet. The few fonts we currently build from
source are the exception. Placing a strict requirement on this
now is very counter-productive. I hope you realise this. Again, various
people in the open font community are working on that front. (you may
want to check the archives for previous discussions on this).

But we certainly want to respectfully engage with upstreams to encourage
them to consider releasing as much useful sources as possible beyond the
final ttf font files for other designers to work from.

Rogério and Paul, are you ready to spend a lot of hours every week to do
font design? Do you have the needed type design skills to fully maintain
a Debian-specific branch of various open fonts pkg-fonts maintains?
Apologies if this sounds harsh but if you are introducing new
Debian-specific build systems this is effectively what you are
committing to. Various upstreams are not in a position to switch their
entire workflow to Debian at this stage.

Overall it seems to me that our team lacks time and manpower to package
the growing number of existing open fonts out there, much less
maintaining Debian-specific forks^HHHHHbranches.


HTH,
Cheers,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger, NRSI volunteer
Debian/Ubuntu font teams
http://planet.open-fonts.org