On 02/15/2011 07:44 PM, Rogério Brito wrote: > In other words, we won't have the infrastructure needed for that, not today, > not in a million years, not whenever. Only if we change our computational > models. Somehow, the upstream team generated the fonts that they ship. We ought to be able to replicate that. Why do we need to change our computational models to do so? > Summarizing, I am not against having the fonts built from source: just do > that in the package building phase and, say, use the command line utility of > fontforge to compare the result with what upstream gives us. If they are the > same, throw them away and ship upstream's version. hmm, i'd say if they are the same, throw away upstream's version and keep the one we built since there's no difference :p But the real question is what to do if there was a difference, not if they're the same. If upstream ships a piece of code, with source and binary, and we compile the source and get a binary that behaves differently, we don't throw out our version and ship what they shipped. I don't think we should make an exception to that rule if the software happens to be a font. > A recent case: > > http://bugs.debian.org/609094#10 > http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/fontforge/news/20110118T151726Z.html I followed this discussion, and was happy to see that we could arrive at what seems to be a functional solution by tweaking the toolchain to bring the generated font more in-line with the binaries produced by upstream. That's a good thing. As an upstream font developer (albeit a casual one), i actually appreciate that other people attempt to build my font from source, and will report if it fails with new versions of the toolchain. That's useful information for me, since i'm not always tracking the bleeding edge of the toolchain myself. > And we are not even talking here about kerning and grid-fitting... if we have problems with kerning, grid-fitting, or any other part, we need to know about them, and we need to improve our tools. Regards, --dkg
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature