musescore 2.0.3+dfsg-1

[Peter Jonas]

Fabian,

You make good points, but I'm not sure I agree with them.

1) In this case the "exception" to Debian policy is actually part of
the policy itself. This policy explicitly allows bundling when a
package is "explicitly intended to be used in this way." MuseScore is
explicitly intended to be built against that particular version of
libfreetype. Upstream is perfectly happy to use Debian libraries for
everything except Freetype, and this is simply because using other
versions of Freetype is known to cause problems.

2) MuseScore is a music notation program so it has a very specific set
of needs that regular text-based programs do not, and those needs are
not likely to be a priority for the developers of Freetype. MuseScore
needs to know the exact size and position of every symbol on the page
to be able to lay them out efficiently without causing collisions. In
an ordinary text document slight differences in kerning between
operating systems might cause a word to be moved onto the next line,
but with sheet music the problem is 100 times more complicated and a
slight difference in kerning could change the musical meaning of a
symbol, or cause the document to go onto a new page, or in an extreme
case even make the score unreadable due to the propagation of
positioning errors onto the locations of all of the other symbols.

3) Nobody is asking pkg-multimedia to maintain Freetype - upstream
specifically want it to be included unmodified. This will save work
for everybody because (a) Debian can forward bug reports upstream, (b)
upstream will stop receiving reports about problems that only exist on
one platform. If Debian removes Freetype then this will create more
work for both Debian and for upstream.

Peter

On 14 July 2016 at 21:25, Fabian Greffrath <fabian at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi again,
>
> Am Donnerstag, den 14.07.2016, 17:18 +0100 schrieb Peter Jonas:
>> Freetype is included because not included for convenience. It is
>> included because MuseScore's code has been tailored towards a
>> specific
>> version of Freetype and other versions of Freetype have been known to
>> cause problems in the past.
>
> hm, I still don't really buy this argument. Some more thoughts on this
> matter:
>
> 1) Debian Policy should always have top-priority for decisions to be
> made regarding software that is maintained in Debian. If "but upstream
> may complain" is reason enough to grant an exception from Debian
> Policy, then we may sooner or later end up with more exceptions than
> rules.
>
> 2) We should ask ourselves *why* upstream is embedding libfreetype. If
> they want the best font rendering result for their users, please feel
> certain that Debian wants to achieve the same result with its own
> library package. I don't see why musescore is so much more tied to a
> specific font rendering library version than other more complex
> applications. And if it is, this somehow tastes like bad practice.
>
> 3) We should ask ourselves *what* upstream is actually embedding. If
> they are embedding a pristine copy of libfreetype, I don't see any
> problem with using Debian's version either. If they are embedding a
> modified version with non-upstreamed changes, they are actually
> creating a fork. Are we as the pkg-multimedia team in a position to
> maingain a fork of a library such as freetype for the sole purpose of
> being used in one single package?
>
> Also, please keep in mind that for some time especially freetype could
> have been used to sneek in potentially patented font rendering code
> paths -- although I am not saying that this is happening here or has
> ever happened at all.
>
> Cheers,
>
>  - Fabian