[Fedora-packaging] Proposed amendment to general packaging guidelines: no bundling of fonts in other packages

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 12:36:40PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> Frankly, the other font formats are so much less useful than modern font
> formats, the probability someone did creative legal restructuring is
> much lower. The big exception are Type1 fonts but I just hope they can
> die die die (and if the Tex-Gyre situation is fixed and we can use OTF

I don't think this may happen in a while because some very interesting
apps (though not mainstream desktop apps, fortunately) uses type1
fonts, mostly using t1lib, like xfig, xdvi, grace. But in general they don't 
use directly the t1lib way to find fonts, only to render them but most of the 
time either use a specific way (like grace) or the tex kpathsea way (if I
recall well it is what xdvi does). It is quite painfull for packaging
not to have something normalized, but I think it should stay as long as
those packages are still in fedora, since I don't think that upstream
will use *tf fonts, still these are very useful packages, especially for
old-timers.

> In the meanwhile, it may make sense to add Type1 to the list.

For tex I believe that it will be too complicated to use the system
fonts. grace don't use embedded fonts anymore. I don't know for other
packages, but indeed trying to use system fonts instead of duplicating
them is a worth goal. It always seemed to me that it was a must fix
even if it was not ain the guidelines, though.

--
Pat