[Pkg-fonts-devel] Amiri 0.106 fails to build on Debian

[Barry Schwartz]

Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org> skribis:
> Subject: Re: [Pkg-fonts-devel] Amiri 0.106 fails to build on Debian
> From: Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny at eglug.org>
> Date: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 00:19:52 +0200
> To: Paul Wise <pabs at debian.org>
> Cc: Debian Fonts Task Force <pkg-fonts-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org>,
>  Barry Schwartz <chemoelectric at chemoelectric.org>
> 
> On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 09:24:39PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:45 AM, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> > 
> > > It is an entirely new thing (basically a FontForge fork), not related to
> > > the tools used to build Barry Schwartz fonts.
> > 
> > I'm up to sortsmill-tools in my once-per-release-upload-everything run
> > so I'm revisiting this thread.
> > 
> > Why fork FontForge instead of contributing to upstream?
> 
> Because we don't like the development direction of current upstream;
> George Williams is no longer working on it, the new team and us have
> different ideas on what a usable working font editor should look like.
> 
> > Why does it have the same name as Barry Schwartz' sortsmill-tools?
> > 
> > Will future versions of Prociono and Goudy Book Letter build with the
> > FontForge sortsmill-tools?
> > 
> > What is the future of  Barry Schwartz' sortsmill-tools?
> 
> Barry has to answer this.

I foresaw this problem.

The original sortsmill-tools has no future other than being the
FontForge build environment for the current versions of the Sorts Mill
fonts. The reason they are abandoned is simply that I plan never to
use Python again; it is a terrible language for the job. Future code
will be written in Guile or possibly Pure (the term rewriting
language). The new software has the old software’s name because the
old software will go away as soon as Guile support in SM Tools is
sufficient for a rewrite. (There is no schedule for that.)

However, there is no reason the current tools cannot be integrated
into the new sortsmill-tools. I just haven’t gotten around to doing
it, but maybe now I should. Really the only thing preventing having
the two ‘versions’ installed together is one would have to edit the
__init__.py file.

Since at this stage the new sortsmill-tools is not released and is
basically just for diehard developers, I figured if they had such to
use both sets of software together they could deal with it however
they preferred, for instance by editing the __init__.py file or
installing in separate locations and using PYTHONPATH.

It _is_ possible to install the new Sorts Mill Tools and what is
called FontForge together. I think all that is needed is to use the
--disable-python-compatibility configure flag, so that the SM Tools
versions of the ‘fontforge’ and ‘psMat’ modules are not installed.
(They are still available, as ‘sortsmill.ffcompat’ and
‘sortsmill.psMat’.)