Bug#1028897: fontconfig: wrong name for the Noto monospace font

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson]

Control: owner -1 gunnarhj at debian.org
Control: tags -1 + pending

On 2023-08-19 17:01, Raphaël Halimi wrote:
> Le 19/08/2023 à 16:04, Gunnar Hjalmarsson a écrit :
>> It's worth mentioning that the fonts-noto packages in Debian ship
>> almost 3 years old fonts. An update to latest upstream would be
>> highly desirable. Possibly Noto Sans Mono has improved.
> 
> I didn't know that. Thanks for mentioning it.
> 
> So, I just downloaded NotoSansMono-Regular.ttf from its new home [1]
> (the old repository in the Debian copyright file has been archived),
> opened it in font-viewer and... Sadly, the spacing is still
> "Proportional" and not "Monospace" :(

Thanks for doing that. So we will probably need to live with it for the 
foreseeable future. And yes, it's a bit sad.

Anyway, I'm now convinced that the status of Noto Sans Moto motivates a 
change of the default monospace font in Debian. Well, you and I haven't 
agreed on what to put there instead, so how about a compromise where we 
pick both? :)

https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/6fae069d

While I still hesitate, since the change affects so many users, I have 
decided to act. After all we are in the beginning of the trixie 
development cycle, so there is plenty of time to change it later. By 
making the change in unstable and testing, we expose it to the users. 
Many will probably not even notice and some will like it. And if some 
users disapprove of the change, the broader discussion we haven't had 
may happen later.

Thanks for your perseverance!

-- 
Cheers,
Gunnar