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

[fabian at greffrath.com]

Hi Gunnar,

Am 2023-08-19 16:04, schrieb Gunnar Hjalmarsson:
> Another question is if the Noto Sans Mono deficiency is important 
> enough to motivate a Debian level change in this respect. I don't know. 
> @Fabian, I sent this reply to you as well in the hope to broaden the 
> discussion a bit.

thanks for asking my opinion!

Well, to be honest, the first thing I did after the change of the 
default monospace font in fontconfig was to manually change my terminal 
font back to DejaVu Sans Mono (I use FiraCode in my text editor anyway, 
so no need to change anythere there). I just can't stand the look of the 
Noto font family, and Noto Mono in particular.

However, I don't think that the upstream change to prefer Noto Mono over 
DejaVu Sans Mono was a decision based on aesthetics, but on sheer number 
of available glyphs. I guess they want to make sure that the default 
font chosen is the one that's available for the most script types.

However, we, in Debian, as a distribution, have all the rights to aim 
for the most aesthetically pleasing view of our default installation and 
thus I support the change back to DejaVu Sans Mono as the default 
monospace font. This, and we already support a localized installation 
and install some additional font packages based on the locale set during 
D-I. So, in the end, we always end up with more than just the default 
font, and thus can prefer one that "looks better" and gets supported by 
other fonts for additional glyph coverage.

Cheers,

  - Fabian