Re: [Pkg-fonts-devel] PackageKit support

["Paul Wise" <pabs@debian.org>]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 4:03 PM, Sebastian Heinlein <glatzor@ubuntu.com> wrote:

> I am the author of the apt backend of PackageKit, a distribution neutral
> package management interface. It enables applications to install
> required components in a common way. Recently support for font
> installation was added.

teh awesome!

> What I need is a way to associate fonts and packages. I have seen that
> you maintain a list of packages with fonts in Debian [2]. Is this data
> available in a more machine friendlier form? Do you keep this
> information in a subversion repository?

This data is created by searching for .ttf/.otf/etc files in the
Contents files, downloading and unpacking the relevant packages and
then processing the files found. The code is here:

http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-fonts/people/yosch/?rev=0&sc=0

> I could think of shipping the data in the packagekit package or
> accessing the Internet to get the information.

I think the best way to do this would be to add a script to debhelper
that would output data about the fonts/langs installed in the package.
Then add a field to the binary package control data that would contain
the data needed. As a result this would be available in the Packages
files for apt/aptitude/packagekit. This way you will guarantee every
user has the information and you won't have to update caches or
anything like that.

for e.g.:

debian/rules:

binary-indep:
    ...
    dh_fontlanguages

debian/control:

Package: ttf-khmeros
...
XB-Provides-Scripts: ${script:Provides}

or:

Package: ttf-khmeros
...
Provides: ${script:Provides}, ...

Binary packages and packages file:

Package: ttf-khmeros
...
Provides: packagekit-script-latin, packagekit-script-khmer

or:

Package: ttf-khmeros
...
Provides-Unicode: latin, khmer

The latter would use this:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s5.7

The data provided to apt could be as coarse or as fine as needed; font
supports unicode scripts xyz, font supports unicode blocks xyz, font
supports unicode codepoint ranges xyz.

BTW, how does the RPM world propose to implement this?

Also, what data does packagekit provide to the distro backend? Unicode
blocks? Lists of Unicode code points?

> Cheers,

Thanks for working on packagekit!

Also, it would be great if you could push screenshot support into
packagekit (now that Debian has a screenshots archive). pkg-fonts also
needs to implement some kind of font screenshot mechanism for it.

-- 
bye,
pabs

http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise