Are we really going to require fonts to be built from sources by Fedora packagers? [Was: Re: Suffix for "Old Standard" ?]

[Vasile Gaburici]

Here are some troublesome points:

- Free font authors may well use non-free tools like FontLab to write
them. E.g., the recent variants of Liberation Sans by Gustavo
Ferreira.
- Free fonts may have a source that requires free-beer tools to
produce, like Adobe FDK, e.g. the TeX Gyre fonts:
http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/tex-gyre/
- Free fonts may require FOSS tools that Fedora does currently ship,
e.g. metatype-1 for Latin Modern:
http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern. BTW, there are
some issues with the lack of OTF versions of these fonts from Fedora's
TeXLive, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455995#c24

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 10:59 AM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
>
> Le Jeu 24 juillet 2008 01:11, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>>
>> 2008/7/23 Martin-Gomez Pablo <pablo.martin-gomez at laposte.net>:
>>>
>>> So we need to add a suffix to the name but I'm not imaginative for
>>> finding a good suffix (maybe "iced" as Nicolas propose), anyone of
>>> you have an lightning idea ?
>>
>> Why not use a build of FF from the same time the source files were
>> published?
>
> 1. Other fonts in the distro depend on a recent fontforge release. If
> we start requiring one fontforge version per font we're dead.
>
> 2. While the author objects most to the current fontforge version, I'm
> almost sure he'd want us to change the font name even if we used the
> exact same version as his.
>
> As the author says, we have to stand up for our own choices. Fedora
> builds its content from sources. With fonts and pretty much anything
> else that means aligning on a few build tool versions which are almost
> certain not to be the same upstreams tested, and if this change
> introduces problems, we have to track and get them fixed.
>
> (but at least we know we can re-generate and patch our version at
> will, unlike organisations that copy a pre-built version and have no
> idea how to fix it in case of problems)
>
> The author's feeling is not uncommon software-side too, you know.
>
> I think we'll try to bump the fontforge version in fedora-devel to the
> latest available upstream just before F10 beta. And then rebuild every
> font depending on it. This way Fedora 10 users will have a recent
> fontforge in-distro and we'll be sure all our fonts work with it.
> That's what we did in previous releases.
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
>
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