[Pkg-fonts-devel] Dropping defoma hints files: current proposed changes

[Paul Wise]

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 12:54 AM, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
<thep at debian.org> wrote:

> Thinking it over, I'd rather wait for the "second round", when apps
> are migrated away from defoma. It seems even xserver-xorg
> still depends on it via x-ttcidfont-conf (although it's rarely used
> in practice, but who knows). And most other affected apps are
> not decided to move yet.

Since only one of the first-round bugs I filed has had a reply in 4
months, probably only gnustep (bug is pending) will get fixed before
the squeeze release.

I read on Debian Planet that the Debian X Strike Force is 0 people
these days (therefore Xorg is almost orphaned) so I doubt the X bug
filed by Thomas Viehmann will get fixed any time soon. I'll ping the
#debian-x channel next time I'm on IRC though.

If we want to achieve defoma removal before squeeze, it will have to
be via NMUs and QA uploads or package removals. I personally don't
have the time or skill with maintainer scripts to do these.

Personally I think it would be best to just proceed with all of the
rounds at the same time, doing anything else introduces too much
artificial delay that will add up to releasing an unfinished defoma ->
fontconfig transition in squeeze. In the meantime those users of those
6 packages in sid will slowly see less and less fonts available,
perhaps leading to the maintainers being motivated to fix the packages
or others motivated to do NMUs and QA uploads. Ultimately the aim is
to get defoma removed before the next stable release and if breaking
fonts for a few packages is the way that will get done, then I say
lets just do it and get the pain over ASAP.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise