[Debian-in-workers] Draft for ttf-indic-fonts restructuring

[Christian PERRIER]

Quoting Mahesh T. Pai (paivakil at gmail.com):

>  > pkg-fonts has a new policy (drafting in progress) for the font
>  > packages for Wheezy. In short following are the main points
> 
> See?? Is it right to change the names only because some change in
> policy is coming up?  What if the changes are not accepted? 
> 
> IIRC, there was some mention that the changes would not happen. 

They *are* happening. We push new fontpackagers to adopt the new
policy and some of us (Yamane-San for instance) started to migrate
packages they maintain to the new naming policy.

One might argue that just renaming packages would be overkill....but,
in the case of ttf-indic-fonts, the change would be coupled with
another important change : splitting the package in several source
packages, particularly when they have a clearly identified upstream.

To followup on this issue, I think this change is long
overdue. ttf-indic-fonts is a very very useful package....but a big
mess of many different upstream packages. So, as an example, splitting
out the Lohit fonts to their own source package is a great great great idea.

>  > 1. Fonts will be named as fonts-[foundry]-name, here foundry will
>  > be name of author or company maintaining the font. After a long
>  > discussion it was decided to make foundry as optional. so in short
>  > new fonts will have name in the format fonts-name
> 
> So, all lohit fonts will come under one package? And each of ML fonts
> wil have a package of its own?

The source package would be one package. Then there would be one
binary package per supported script.


> 
> Rest is pure user POV; please tell me if others expect / experience
> things differently.
> 
> Right now, for me, I install ttf-malayalam-fonts and
> ttf-devanagari-fonts (for Indic), because I know that is all I will
> require; but when I do the install for others, I install the
> ttf-indic-fonts metapackage.
> 
> Installing ttf-<lang>-fonts package gives me all families (serif,
> sans-serif etc) of fonts in that language, without much hassle. I
> recognise that with more DFSG-free fonts becoming available, we will
> have better freedom in repackaging them; but right now, I see no
> reason to.

These ones could be meta-packages depending on individual packages. At
least for the transition.

However, I'd like to raise a point. You mention you install for
instance ttf-malayalam-fonts to install all fonts supporting Malayalam
script. That's indeed untrue. It installs all font packages *built
from ttf-indic-fonts*. If another font perfectly supports Malayalam
but is built from another source package, it won't be installed.

>  > 2. deprecating defoma. Its decided to remove all the dependencies on
>  > defoma (Debian font manager) in Wheezy.
> 
> What does that mean from the user POV? 

Nothing. But that's important for Debian overall. defoma is a huge
mess of bugs, is unmaintained, and has been recognized as mostly useless if not
perturbating in some cases.

> 
>  > Now coming to ttf-indic-fonts, its a meta package (multiple source
>  > in single? or whatever I don't know how to describe it properly its
> 
> A metapackage depends on other packages; by itself, that package
> contains nothing. .

ttf-indic-fotns is of course not a metapackage but a source package.

However, this is a source package with multiple upstreams.

With source v3, that could be dealt with multiple .orig.tar.gz
tarballs....but I think it is vastly preferrable to just split the
source package as proposed.


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