Team status: fonts-team (Fall 2019)

[Hideki Yamane <henrich@debian.org>]

Hi list,

 Maybe it's better to provide some information to team members what
 we should do (in short term), so I'd try to summarize it. Hope it
 helps you a bit...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 How about the current status of font related packages?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

* package numbers in "fonts" sections
  (by "aptitude search '?section(fonts)' | wc -l")

  - Debian8 : 426
  - Debian9 : 513 (+87)
  - Debian10: 571 (+58)
  - current : 589 (+18)

  Yeah, growing up :-)

 * bugs: 261
   https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?dist=unstable;maint=debian-fonts%40lists.debian.org;maint=pkg-fonts-devel%40lists.alioth.debian.org

 * current status
  https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=pkg-fonts-devel%40lists.alioth.debian.org
  https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=debian-fonts%40lists.debian.org
  
  # note:
    "NOT" all the packages in fonts section are under fonts-team umbrella,
    so bugs and status don't cover at all. We should try to move it.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 What is/was the major blocker for us?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 We are in "python2 removal" movement, it affects to many font packages that
 requires to be built. But I've recently uploaded new fontforge source package
 it contains "python3-fontforge" package and it resolves most of issues with it.
 And "python3-fonttools"/"python3-fontmake" can deal with it, too.

 Please try to fix it, hope smoooth migration near future.

 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Other tasks now?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 * Move "fonts" packages to fonts-team umbrella

   Easy task: try to check "fonts" section package and ask maintainers to
   move it to fonts-team.


 * Digging bugs - can we reproduce it?

   Sadly, we still have many open bugs in BTS, more than 200! :-(
   So, please check it still occurs with newest versions or not, and if not,
   please find which version fixed the issue. https://snapshot.debian.org/ is
   very useful to get older versions.


 * Send patches to upstream - make upstream better :)

   Pick files from debian/patches and send it to upstream (maybe by making PR
   on github) is help for us and them.


 * Squashing "todo" items

   https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?pkg-fonts-devel%40lists.alioth.debian.org#todo
   https://udd.debian.org/dmd/?debian-fonts%40lists.debian.org#todo

   Check above items list first, and try to fix them.  


 * Polish package

   Many packages still contains
    - old "Vcs-*" field
    - non-"machine-readable debian/copyright" file
    - older debhelper
   and not enable
    - use CI with debian/salsa-ci.yml (most of fonts packages don't need blhc and )
    - Rules-Requires-Root: no


 So "clean it, polish it" is our current task. Let's make it better
 - as possible as we can, and check it on "winter" report later.


-- 
Regards,

 Hideki Yamane     henrich @ debian.org/iijmio-mail.jp
 http://wiki.debian.org/HidekiYamane