Re: RFS: fonts-play update
Am 04.12.2019 22:54, schrieb Martin Erik Werner:
alexeiva/play seems to have started from the 2.000 release of the font,
which I am (wildly) guessing was exported from the google font
directory based on the ttf files that existed at that point?
What I find a bit concerning id that the pull request to update the font
to the v2 release contained a .glyphs-file, but now the repository
doesn't:
https://github.com/google/fonts/commit/e36afc7567e2c4dbe669ca5810e0c77f307295a0#diff-c953c32b9c6c9f552f995d7fabfd312e
The otf fonts are created for backwards compatibility reasons, the
fonts-play package previously generated ttf and otf fonts from sfd
files and the intention was to ensure that nothing which depended on
the otf files broke due to them missing in this new version of the
package.
I find this concerning for multiple reasons:
- Installing both OTF and TTF font formats is redundant, please decide
for one of them (prefereably the one that upstream considers as
canonical).
- I guess you are doing the font no good by opening it as a TTF in
fontforge and saving it as an OTF. This probably opens a can of worms
for bugs and conversion errors.
- With the RFN in mind, you are modifying the font under the same name
without permission.
What you could probably do is have a look at packages that depend on
fonts-play and see how they use that font. If they are loading it via
fontconfig, you should be fine with packaging either format. If they
hard-code the path to the OTF font file, I guess they'll be fine with
the TTF variant as well (font parsers being able to read OTF should also
be able to read TTF). For software using fonts-play outside of Debian,
there isn't much you can do about anyway.
The svn access on github allows checking out a subset of a large Git
repository and since the google fonts directory is around 0.5Gb I
figured is was the best way to get at the desired subset.
I didn't even know this, thank you!
If we can use alexeiva/play as an upstream, this will of course
unnecessary since the repo is much smaller and also provides Git tag
releases.
I'd prefer that. After all, it's the same font that the google font
directory uses - but with sources available.
Thanks,
- Fabian
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