Re: Bug#1029707: Maybe set DejaVu Sans Mono as default font for Arabic
On 2023-02-03 17:20, Simon McVittie wrote:
On Fri, 03 Feb 2023 at 11:49:34 +0100, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
I chose to set "Monospace" when needed instead of specifying "DejaVu Sans
Mono" explicitly.
You said in the new patch that fontconfig prefers DejaVu Sans Mono as
its implementation of Monospace in Arabic-script locales. To confirm,
is that true upstream, or just in Debian/Ubuntu, or just in Ubuntu?
It's upstream, more specifically /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf. And
you get this result:
$ LC_CTYPE=ar_EG.UTF-8 fc-match monospace
DejaVuSansMono.ttf: "DejaVu Sans Mono" "Book"
also with fontconfig 2.14 even if 60-latin.conf now prefers Noto for
most other locales.
* Consider an Arabic Debian user who opens Tweaks and picks some beautiful
monospace font with e.g. the text editor in mind. With the patch applied,
that user would not screw up the rendering of Arabic in gnome-terminal
unknowingly.
Equally, if another Arabic-speaking Debian user opens Tweaks and picks
a monospace font that *does* work OK in vte terminals, they would be
surprised and probably consider it to be a bug for gnome-terminal not to
respect that preference?
Fair enough. This hack to fix a known issue comes with a cost. Thanks to
your input we no longer override the font size at least. But note that
the Arabic speaking reporter of the Ubuntu bug sees the issue in VTE
terminals with all other fonts he has tested.
* With the patch also in Debian, we avoid to add to the Ubuntu/Debian delta,
which is always desirable. :)
If it's good enough for Debian, is it good enough for upstream?
The approach to special case Arabic might be, but probably not that
particular code. Doing it all in one single block of code makes sense in
a patch since it makes maintenance easier. But I imagine that it would
be a rather time consuming exercise to get some equivalent change into
upstream, and am not inclined ATM to do that. Maybe better to do it for
gnome-console later, if a decision is made to make that terminal the
default.
Avoiding adding to the Debian/upstream delta is at least as valuable
as avoiding adding to the Ubuntu/Debian delta.
Or if it's not suitable for upstream, I think we should only apply it
in Debian if the benefit *to Debian* is worth the cost of divergence
from upstream. The GNOME team already has too many places where someone
applied a patch several years ago, none of us know whether it's safe
to remove, and it's adding maintenance cost every time we update to a
upstream release.
I'm familiar with that problem...
On the Ubuntu side the benefit of having this patch is worth the cost
without doubt, since we have a *default* which triggers the issue for
Arabic. I guess you will need to take the decision for Debian. ;)
This is particularly problematic for areas like localization into a
specific language or script, which relatively few people understand in
detail. I spent a significant amount of time doing the research that
led to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/183 eventually being
fixed upstream, 10+ years after the change was made in Debian... but I
wouldn't have had to spend time digging up the reasoning if the change
had been proposed upstream at the time!
So you mean that doing it only in Ubuntu and possibly Debian would be to
do a similar mistake? Maybe. But at least the patch header is now clear
about the background.
--
Rgds,
Gunnar
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