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

[Nicolas Spalinger]

On 10/11/10 21:25, Dave Crossland wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 10 November 2010 20:00, Nicolas Spalinger <nicolas_spalinger at sil.org> wrote:
>> The few fonts we currently build from
>> source are the exception. Placing a strict requirement on this
>> now is very counter-productive.
> 
> Could someone kindly explain to me, as a newbie here, why fonts that
> have a non-free build path are packaged in main and not contrib? :-)


Ha, nice try!  (oh, the delicious irony of asking that kind of question
from a hosted service that AFAICT is not exactly Franklin Street
Statement-friendly... from your new MacBook maybe? SCR.)

There have been plenty of discussions on this both IRL and in the
pkg-fonts team (see the archives)...  And yet you regularly come back to
this. What is your point exactly? Trying to push for all the fonts to be
pulled from the Debian archive to better fit your views on licensing?
What would we gain from this exactly?

The DFSG #2 does not specifically require a build path. The provided ttf
object files are also source that can be reused and modified. More
sources can and should be provided but that's besides the point.

AFAICT non-free and contrib contains only a handful of packages related
to fonts. Mostly superseded it seems. And both non-free and contrib are
not officially part of the Debian distribution. Our font review doesn't
analyse these.


Now if I may ask, how's the fully reproducible self-contained build-path
coming on for your own fonts? And the corresponding packaging for
Fedora? Considering the growth in coverage and complexity ahead?


Cheers,


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