Re: Help needed making a collection of fonts into a .deb

[Matt Chisholm <matt@theory.org>]

Hi. I posted a question here a few days ago about making my fonts into a debian
package.

I've tried  using  dh_make  on  a  tarball of my fonts, and this has produced a
plethora of  files,  and  I'm somewhat stuck on the "rules" file. I think I can
figure this out, if I keep plugging away at it.

I have  succesfully  made a .deb which I can install & uninstall. Here is how I
did it: By expanding the sharefont_0.10-7.deb package with dpkg -e and dpkg -x,
I got  directory  with  the  contents  of  sharefont_0.10-7.deb.  I  used  this
directory as  a  model  for setting up my own directory of fonts, complete with
postinst, postrm,  & control files. I then ran dpkg -b on this directory, which
produced a deb file which I can install and uninstall. (and yes, the fonts work
fine)

My question is:

Is this an appropriate way to proceed (using another package as a model?)? Will
I run into any terrible problems using this method?

Thanks for  everyone  who responded to my original letter. I don't mean to be a
nuisance and  ask  (what  must  seem  to  you)  silly  questions.  But  I  have
*absolutely no*  experience  or  familiarity  with  this,  and  it  seems  very
complicated.

matt

If anyone wants to see the deb I made, it is at:
http://www.theory.org/~matt/strthrwr/fonts/download/matttsfonts.deb
(It's in  flagrant  violation  of the debian-policy on fonts, creating it's own
directory. I'll fix that eventually.)

BTW, many  people  have  asked  about the status of fonts as source/binary, and
what the build process is, and how they might be released under the GPL. I'm no
expert, but  here's my opinion: These are PostScript fonts, and PostScript is a
language (by  some  stretch of the imagination). So these fonts are, in effect,
distributed in their source code form (much like a perl script would be).

PostScript/TrueType fonts  can  be created by a number of programs (nothing for
*nix, AFAIK),  and  these  programs are basically drawing programs which output
PostScript and  TrueType  code  which draws each letter. So, if you can believe
it, it's source that can't be edited (easily) under *nix.