Bug#902981: Font Awesome v5 in Debian
On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 04:47:35PM +0100, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> Quoting Bastian Germann (2023-01-24 16:28:59)
> > [...]
> > When you search Debian it turns out, Font Awesome 5 is around in A LOT of packages.
> > A good starting point is https://lintian.debian.org/tags/font-in-non-font-package.
> > It will take a lot of effort to get it out. I have started at #1025000.
> >
> > I agree with Alexandre here but there seem to be people that ignore this sentiment
> > as you can see at #1027982. How would we go about it?
>
> Thanks for looking into this, Bastian.
>
> You are correct in filing such bugs with high severity.
>
> If the reaction as seen with bug#1027982 is more widespread, you might
> consider adding a usertag to those bugreports, to ease later raising as
> a general concern to debian-devel the issue of relaxed treatment of
> licensing violations.
I am waiting for node-webfont to be accepted into the archive (it is
currently sitting in NEW). Once that happens, I believe that I will
be able to take the DFSG-free SVG files and some other data files from
the upstream FontAwesome GitHub repository and build the FontAwesome 5
and 6 fonts from source. I will base my code heavily on
https://github.com/Templarian/MaterialDesign-Font-Build; see what I've
done in a draft new version of the Material Design Icon font in my
experimental packages at
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/fonts-materialdesignicons-webfont
(though the change in version -2 getting rid of the fontname
distinctions turns out to be wrong and I will revert to the version -1
scheme some point soon).
This will mean that we will be able to ship a DFSG-free version of
FontAwesome 5 and 6 in Debian; the webfonts may well not be
byte-identical to the upstream versions, but they should be
functionally identical. We can then ask the maintainers of the
packages shipping these fonts to replace the embedded fonts with links
to the DFSG-free versions.
If you would like me to go ahead and work on this, please say.
Practically speaking, this will be for bookworm+1 as there is no hope
of getting any new version of FontAwesome into bookworm at this point
- node-webfont is still waiting in NEW, and may not itself make it
into bookworm, so I won't try to do it until after the bookworm
release. (I would add myself to the Uploaders, and make the source
package produce separate binary packages for FontAwesome 4.7, 5 and
6. I would also ask for a review from the Debian Fonts Team list
before uploading.)
Best wishes,
Julian
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