[Pkg-fonts-devel] current state and future of liberation-fonts

[Jonas Smedegaard]

Quoting Fabian Greffrath (2014-01-27 06:39:56)
> now that we have the croscore fonts available in Debian, too, I really 
> wonder what we need liberation v2 fonts for? I mean, are they anything 
> more than a rebranded version of the croscore fonts? And if yes, what 
> benefit do they bring over just using the croscore fonts?
> 
> Or asked differently: Shouldn't we just decide to abandon the 
> liberation fonts and ship croscore fonts instead? Or what would we be 
> missing then?

Generally I think that unless a replacement font ships with fontconfig 
aliasing hinting *and* provides identical metrics, I believe we should 
only deprecate, not drop, legacy fonts.

Reason is that fonts are more likely than applications likely to be 
required in legacy documents, and therefore disrupting the environment 
of our users if dropped.

A way of deprecating could be this:

  * Move to section oldlibs
  * Rename from fonts-* to fonts-legacy-*
  * Add "Provides:" and "Replaces:" for old fonts-* package name
  * Add "Recommends:" for good alternative(s) with same metrics
  * Add "Suggests:" for likely alternatives without same metrics

...and then one or two releases later drop the font, but not before.


 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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