texlive-2009 breakage?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 5 novembre 2009 09:26, Jindrich Novy a écrit :

Hi Jindrich,

> It is good to hear from you because I have a proposal for the
> modification of macros.fonts in the "fontpackages". The reason is that
> I had to manually hack it in order to let the TeX Live auto-generation
> pass.
>
> The problem is that TeX Live provides a package "Asana-Math" which
> provides couple of fonts. Note that there are upper case letters in
> the name.

Using lowercase is part of the fonts packaging guidelines. If we wanted to use
font names as-is we'd have to authorize utf-8 package names (with codepoints
outside the basic latin block), since font names are not necessarily basic
latin (and in fact we *already* have several fonts in the distro with unicode
names). Since FESCO decided unicode package names were a no-go, we frob
package names completely fonts side and also lowercase them (as Debian, Suse,
etc do; mixed case packages do not work on windows servers and FAT flash keys
and are a nuisance for users). Lastly many upstreams do not use consistent
casing for their font names (depending on the naming layer you look at) and
for that reason fontconfig has to lowercase font names by default before
processing (though it has to accept unicode names, and lowercases them
according to unicode rules).

Besides Asana is already packaged Fedora-side using the most recent upstream
version IIRC.

> Patch to fix macros.fonts is attached.

I really do not wish to allow a case that goes against current font packaging
guidelines all our font packages already respect (since, as you noted, it does
not work if they don't).

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot