Bug#902981: Font Awesome v5 in Debian
Hi Nathan,
On Sun, Jan 29, 2023 at 12:46:46PM +0000, Nathan Willis wrote:
> Please don't take the following info as stop-energy (which it's not), but there
> is already an active project doing the task of liberating the no-longer-free
> symbols from Font Awesome, called ForkAwesome:
> https://github.com/ForkAwesome/Fork-Awesome ... which has also added a fair
> number of new glyphs since it was founded (6+ years ago).
We have switched to ForkAwesome for (python3-)qtawesome following the
bug report about FontAwesome not being free. Unfortunately, it has
not had a commit since December 2021 and no new icons since September
2021. It has many, many fewer icons than FontAwesome, and in many
cases cannot be used as a replacement for it.
My proposal is *not* to create fonts which mimic FontAwesome. The
only issue for Debian (as evidenced by the discussion in this bug
report) is that the fonts cannot be recreated from the SVG files. The
license that upstream have used on their fonts and SVG files is
generously open, and their only (public) reason for not sharing their
build process publicly is that their commercial offerings use the same
infrastructure.
Therefore the only thing that I am proposing is writing an open-source
build structure for recreating the FontAwesome webfonts from the SVG
sources. As most of the work has already been done by other people,
this should be relatively straightforward, and will be able to keep
up-to-date with upstream's font offerings.
The resulting webfonts should be drop-in replacements for the upstream
versions, offering exactly the same icons.
I hope that makes a little more sense.
Best wishes,
Julian
Reply to: