Bug#899124: fonts-font-awesome: completely breaks web applications, with no notice

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

Alexis,

Thanks for your contribution to this bug report.

> [1] Here is an analysis of font-awesome usage across sid packages from
> [3]: Packages embedding a copy of font-awesome:
> [...]
> python-xstatic-font-awesome 4.7.0.0-4: embedded copy of 4.7

Nope, python-xstatic-font-awesome has the fonts in the source package,
but when building the binaries, they are removed and the package points
to /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome/fonts/ (through some Python Xstatic
mechanisms). And under the current situation, the package is currently
completely broken. Threfore, I'm also considering re-embedding the files
in, unless we find a solution.

I very much agree with you that adding a new fonts-font-awesome-v4
package would fix the situation, at least during the time of the
transition. I don't see any issue with doing this, as this really is 2
sets of very different fonts, and also, I don't see how having 2
versions of fonts is a problem (it's unlike shared libraries where
there's security issues when duplicating stuff).

If we can't do that, then I also believe that adding links to
fa-solid-900 as fontawesome-webfont would be helpful.

Anyways, I'll try to get upstream to upgrade to v5.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)