[Pkg-fonts-devel] Future of fonts-android (source) [Was: updated fonts-androd has fonts missing]

[Vasudev Kamath]

Hi all,

I'm splitting from the original thread to have a clear discussion.

Me and Jonas Smedegaard had a discussion on what should be done with
fonts-android and especially fonts-droid and fonts-roboto now that
upstream has removed Droid* fonts except Fallback variants and roboto
fonts being moved to seperate upstream. I will try to summarize our
discussion here, please feel free to add your comments.

History
=======

Source fonts-android was previously only fonts-droid and we introduced
new source fonts-android when we noticed new Roboto fonts comming in. So
fonts-android acted as a source package and fonts-droid and fonts-roboto
binary packages.

Current Status
=============

1. DroidSans and DroidSerif variants are removed by upstream and new
   tarball now contains only DroidSansMono and DroidSans fallback
   variants. (DroidSansFallback and DroidSansFallbackFull).
2. Roboto fonts are also dropped from upstream repository.

Looking at commit history of upstream it was clear that Roboto is
removed because its part of new upstream and we should clearly package
it from there. There is also some indication that DroidSans and Serif
variants are removed because its merged into Noto ¹.

Future
======

After our discussion I propose following.

1. Its time we split fonts-android into proper upstream fonts, till now
   fonts-android was just collection from Android source repository.
2. We provide appropriate transitional package for stretch to allow
   smooth transition. (We need to decide what should be done depending
   on fonts usage)

Since currently upstream provides only fallback variants we will provide
a new package fonts-droid-fallback and fonts-droid transitional dummy
package pulls in this package and once we confirm that Droid is really
merged into Noto we can make appropriate package from fonts-noto source
as dependency of fonts-droid transitional dummy package.

Currently fonts-droid has following reverse dependencies as part
apt-cache rdepends

fonts-droid
Reverse Depends:
  blender
  josm
  blender
  wesnoth-1.13-data
  wesnoth-1.12-data
  texlive-fonts-extra
  task-chinese-t-desktop
  task-chinese-s-desktop
  signing-party
  request-tracker4
  performous
  josm
  gnome-shell-pomodoro-data
  libgs9-common
  cinnamon-desktop-environment

Once we do above change we might need to inform these packages via bug
reports to update their package appropriately.

Now coming fonts-roboto, we need to package it from the actual
upstream. Currently there are following packages which has dependency on
fonts-roboto

fonts-roboto
Reverse Depends:
  birdfont
  diaspora
  google-android-sdk-docs-installer
  texlive-fonts-extra
  renpy
  kodi-data
  kodi

At this point I won't promise build from source as requested in this bug
report ², and this topic we will discuss as part of separate mail.


@Jonas I'm not sure if I properly summarized our discussion, if I didn't
please correct me.

@all Please share your thoughts :-)

¹ https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/a08f0f8f453bb192dd0c4cd25a5aeb05986805fc
² https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786971

Cheers,
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