Quoting Steve White (stevan.white@googlemail.com): > You don't insist on building all your jpegs and png files from source > (I think). Why do you insist on building ttf files? For instance to be able to have our source packages use patches such as the various ones you could use when you took ttf-freefont over? Debian is committed to its users' needs. One of these is one the building stones of Free Software: be able to modify the source code and adapt it to one's own needs. By offering our users the easiest possibility to modify the font packages we provide, we're respecting that item of the Debian social contract: we are committed to our users and free software. By doing that, we also comply to a commitment by Debian maintainers, contribute back our improvements to upstream developers. Speaking about TTF files, you're actually hit one of the weaknesses of many of our font packages: many of them are just providing random TTF files which our users can't modify themselves... Providing TTF files that are buildable at package compilation time is not a requirement by the Debian policy. There's actually a grey line here and many Debian ttf-* packages are just what you suggest: random collection of unmodifiable TTF files. But *those* are the ones that need to be changed...not the packages that already allow font modifications such as ttf-freefont or ttf-dejavu (and many others maintained by the pkg-fonts team now).
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature