arial narrow is broken since Fedora 8

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mer 10 décembre 2008 01:54, Kevin Kofler a écrit :

> Please do not ignore real-world usability in your quest for
> perfection.

This is not a quest of perfection this is getting font and text bugs
fixed.

The freetype autohinter has progressed because we've enabled it in
Fedora despite its problems and told people to report bugs upstream
instead of helping them enable the bytecode interpreter and ignore the
problem.

OO.o has started working on OpenType CFF support because we told them
plainly we would not stop merging fonts in this format or prioritize
OpenType TTF just so people didn't notice that unlike other apps, OO.o
didn't work.

Ligature support was fixed in Firefox because we didn't try to hide
them and so people complained upstream of upstream bugs.

Likewise ligature support was lately fixed in freetype, again because
we didn't hide the problem and people complained in the right place
(upstream issue trackers, not general-purpose downstream lists).

When we tried to hide a problem by removing triggering glyphs
font-side there was 0% progress on fixing application-side and some
upstreams still argue we should restore the hiding so they don't have
to bother.

Red Hat tried to avoid font problems by not merging anything that
looked like it would trigger application bugs, and had to shell some
millions later for Liberation; complaining at the same time the FLOSS
font scene really was not active enough for them to rely on it. Well,
if you want activity you have to support this activity not ignore it
and hope things will magically perfect themselves without distro-side
exposition.

Your proposition is made of 100% pure un-adultered FAIL. And facts
back me up on this.

You'll find scores of people to rewrite spontaneously media players,
MUAs, or the distro boot chrome, but people won't work on font
problems unless users complain to them, and users won't complain if
you hide or diffuse the problems. They'll just note Fedora font
support is crap, without pointing to any specific fact.

Just Google for 'linux fonts', and you'll find many such reports,
culminating around 2006, which incidently is when Fedora decided to
get its feet wet, and released Fedora 6 with DejaVu LGC as default,
breaking the status quo and starting the virtuous circle of upstream
fixes.

True, even with users complaining, some bugs take ages to get fixed,
but the way to accelerate this is to get more users to complain, not
remove the complains. If some of your favorite DEs or apps are not
fixed yet organise fellow users and put some pression upstream (or,
better, find someone to submit upstream a patch).

I personally think our current course is the best to « [lead] the
advancement of free, open software and content. »

Anyway, I'm sick of repeating the same arguments in different forums.
Here's the deal: you disagree with our current font strategy, so go
convince FESCO. If FESCO agrees with you, I'll happily give you the
Fonts SIG keys, and let you manage as you wish from now on. I
personnaly do not intend to waste my personal time trying to improve
the Fedora font situation if one of the precious few levers I have at
my disposition, users complaining upstream of problems, is removed.

And that's the last thing I'll write on the subject.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot