[Pkg-fonts-devel] Bug#721626: texlive-base: .pfm files really needed?

[Fabian Greffrath]

Package: texlive-base
Version: 2012.20120611-5
Severity: minor

Hello,

I am currently packaging the updated urw-base35 font set. In the course of
that, I asked myself about the purpose of the .pfm files that accompany each
individual font. It turns out that these files contain the same information as
the .afm metric files in a binary format and are only used on Windows systems.
This left me confident that it's a good choice to drop these files from the
Debian package, until I found out that at least the texlive-base, texlive-
fonts-extra, texlive-fonts-recommended and texlive-pictures packages do also
ship those files for (some of) the included fonts.

Now the question arises: Does TeX somehow, in any way, use or need these files
or are they really fine to drop on non-Windows platforms. I am going to make my
decision to keep these files depending on yours, since there are no other
packages installed on my (rather complete with regard to fonts, TeX, X, ..)
Debian system that contain .pfm files.

Best regards,

 - Fabian



-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (990, 'stable'), (900, 'unstable'), (700, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.10-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages texlive-base depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.50
ii  dpkg                   1.16.10
ii  install-info           5.1.dfsg.1-4
ii  libpaper-utils         1.1.24+nmu2
ii  luatex                 0.70.1.20120524-3
ii  tex-common             4.03
ii  texlive-binaries       2012.20120628-4
ii  texlive-common         2012.20120611-5
ii  texlive-doc-base       2012.20120611-1
ii  ucf                    3.0027+nmu1
ii  xdg-utils              1.1.0~rc1+git20111210-7

Versions of packages texlive-base recommends:
ii  lmodern  2.004.4-3

Versions of packages texlive-base suggests:
ii  evince [postscript-viewer]       3.4.0-3.1+b1
ii  ghostscript [postscript-viewer]  9.05~dfsg-8
pn  perl-tk                          <none>
pn  xpdf-reader | pdf-viewer         <none>

Versions of packages tex-common depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]  1.5.50
ii  dpkg                   1.16.10
ii  ucf                    3.0027+nmu1

Versions of packages tex-common suggests:
ii  debhelper  9.20130720

Versions of packages texlive-base is related to:
ii  tex-common        4.03
ii  texlive-binaries  2012.20120628-4

-- debconf information:
  tex-common/check_texmf_wrong:
  texlive-base/binary_chooser: pdftex, dvips, dvipdfmx, xdvi
  tex-common/check_texmf_missing:
  texlive-base/texconfig_ignorant: