[Pkg-fonts-devel] Amiri 0.106 fails to build on Debian

Khaled Hosny khaledhosny at eglug.org
Wed Jun 5 20:56:16 UTC 2013


On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 10:21:53PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 9:47 PM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> 
> > Building fonts from source using FontForge has never been a reliable
> > procedure, and unless you intend to verify that the built fonts are
> > identical to the distributed ones (with the reasonable limits, of
> > course), you shouldn't be doing it since you gain absolutely nothing (it
> > is not like I can sneak in a backdor in a font file).
> 
> The gain is the most important aspect of free software; that you can
> modify something, build a new version and use it instead of the
> original.

You certainly can, that why I distribute the source! (I even removed the
reserved font name clause in the license of the latest version, so
people can modify the font and need not to rename it, which Debian was
probably infringing before, since the mere act of rebuilding the font
with a different version of FontForge can and do modify it). But the our
current tools are very unreliable, so you are likely to introduce bugs
(which did happen before in Debian, that is not a hypothetical issue)
unless you intend to test every generated font throughly like I do
myself.

But you are not modifying the fonts, so why go into the trouble of
potentially introducing bugs that well go unfixed for long (like
happened before with other fonts in Debian) just to prove a point?

And before telling me we should fix the tools (like I was told before),
be my guest and go fix them and you will be my hero (sincerely).

Regards,
Khaled



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