[Pkg-fonts-devel] Please check reverse dependencies before moving files around

[Paul Wise]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 2:33 AM, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:

> More generally, do we have a set of recommended best practices for tools
> which might need to search for fonts?

Do the following, in decreasing order of preference:

Use a runtime font rendering library that handles all the font stuff
and falls back on other fonts when glyphs are not available. I believe
Qt, Pango, QuesoGLC are examples of that. IIRC FTGL cannot do that
yet, not sure about others.

Use fontconfig to find the filename corresponding to a font name and
pass that filename to your renderer at runtime.

Pass a hardcoded path to your font renderer at runtime.

Use Qt/Pango/QuesoGLC at build time to render pre-generated images.

Use fontconfig at build time to render pre-generated images.

Use a hardcoded path at build time to render pre-generated images.

> If we had a clearly-stated recommendation that would be an improvement
> over hard-coded paths, we could just file bugs against packages that use
> hard-coded paths and let them suffer the consequences of possible
> renames/moves.

We should add this statement to debian-policy and or UpstreamGuide on the wiki.

> To be clear, I'm not just interested in making this "not our problem" --
> having such a recommendation would improve the robustness of the
> packages in the archive.

I think we should go further; we should push this upstream as much as possible.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise