[Pkg-fonts-devel] Cantarel font

[Nicolas Spalinger]

On 07/03/11 15:25, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> Hey Nicolas,
> 
> thanks for the review.
> 
> Am 07.03.2011 15:15, schrieb Nicolas Spalinger:
>> I'd recommend that you get in touch with upstream to investigate their
>> current makefile system (currently broken in git AFAICT) instead of
>> forking off the build and making a Debian-specific derivative.
>>
>> They probably want more than the simple build script from
>> http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/scripting-tutorial.html
> 
> the current source tarball is not prepared to rebuild the fonts, just to
> install them.

Ah OK. What is on the repository right now is a bit misleading then.

> I could suggest them to adopt the build system of e.g. ttf-liberation if
> that helps.

IMHO Liberation does not follow the same development philosophy given
its different history and origin: commissioned from a proprietary
foundry then maintained by FLOSS contributors. OTOH Cantarell author(s)
have their own fully self-contained build system made from scratch from
the beginning with only a FLOSS design toolkit (or at least that's the
intent AFAICT).

My point was to recommend pinging them and asking to make their build
system usable by packagers instead of us forking it or grafting
something else on top (even from a different project) they may not use
themselves, which really boils down to maintaining the delta which is
non-trivial.


>> And the VCS structure is likely to get adjusted before GNOME 3 release:
>> FONTLOG, coverage information, webfont formats, etc.
> 
> Is there anything I can do about this?

Well, apart from gently and respectfully nudging the authors and
maintainers, maybe sending patches so that the font source tree comes
closer to the general community recommendation of our
foo-open-font-sources VCS template?

>> There's also the issue of our package naming conventions:
>> fonts-$foundry-$fontfamilyname.
> 
> Yes, I've heard about this, but never saw it documented anywhere. What
> do you suggest as a package name, fonts-gnome-cantarell?

Considering that the copyright of the work is assigned to a company and
not GNOME as a non-profit, I'm not sure how GNOME could be the
foundry...    Also there are some discrepancies with a foundry name
which is different than the company name in the metadata of the various
source files.

I guess it's good to ask upstream to clarify and be consistent before we
package.

These kind of checks (and the corresponding policy items) are what
packagers can help upstream with, if only by pointing them out and
waiting for such adjustments to be made before getting software in the
archive.

That's especially useful for font software.

> Also, since the format of the font files is not reflected by the package
> name anymore, which format do we prefer? OTF over TTF? What if there is
> also a Type1 font available?

The Fedora binary package currently picks up only the .otf files.
I think we should do the same given the scope of that particular open font.

AFAICT Cantarell has little in terms of smart behaviours at this stage
but I don't think there are plans to provide older formats like type1.
Worth asking upstream IMHO.


>  - Fabian


(BTW no need to cc: me I'm subscribed to the list)

Thanks,


-- 
Nicolas Spalinger,
SIL NRSI volunteer - http://scripts.sil.org
Debian fonts task force -  http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org
Open font community - http://planet.open-fonts.org