Re: Change of templates file in fontconfig-config
Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
> On 2023-09-04 08:19, Justin B Rye wrote:
>> Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>>> I made a minor — but important — change to the
>>> debian/fontconfig-config.templates file in the fontconfig source
>>> package:
>>>
>>> https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/45d8eda0
>>>
>>> That created fuzzy items in the PO files. I saw the reference to
>>> this list in the file, so this is a heads-up. Not sure how a
>>> change like this is expected to be further processed.
>>
>> debian-l10n-english is the one part of the debian-i18n hierarchy
>> where there's no work to be done; it's all the other languages that
>> still have the bit in parentheses.
>
> Right. Probably the comment at the top of the file, where
> debian-l10n-english is mentioned, should be altered or dropped.
Well, *most* changes to template text need to go through d-l-e on
their way to translators, this is just one where we get to take a
shortcut.
>> Maybe this is a case where you can safely pick out and delete those
>> bits and declare it unfuzzied, without needing to be fluent in Urdu
>> and so on?
>
> Unless somebody objects, I may do that.
>
>> I'm Ccing d-i18n for any input.
>
> Thanks for broadening the audience.
>
>> Mind you, if fontconf-confontconfig-config now has a different
>> default font, why do the package dependencies still have dejavu as
>> first preference?
>
> That's true in Debian 12, but not in testing:
And I could easily have checked that, but somehow I forgot.
> https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/5aa10dde
>
>> If you aren't running plasma or cinnamon, almost nothing seems to
>> pull in fonts-noto - not even fonts-recommended.
>
> Well, fonts-noto-core is recommended by the libreoffice binary, which means
> that Noto is effectively default in Debian 12 also with the GNOME desktop.
It's a surprisingly tenuous dependency chain for something we might
want to rely on; I didn't have fonts-noto-core installed anywhere,
probably because I had noticed how many things libreoffice pulled in
and was sceptical about any functionality I was ever going to use
requiring *both* -dejavu *and* -noto.
Wait a minute... gnome-desktop depends on libreoffice-calc, -gnome,
and -impress, but not libreoffice itself, so the Recommends: on
fonts-noto-core is bypassed. If I ask aptitude to get ready to
install task-gnome-desktop on my testing machine (complete with
Recommends), that pulls in a vast horde of packages (it would almost
double the number of installed packages on that machine), but not
one of the extra package names begins with "fon"! Presumably that's
another instance of upgrades keeping what's already there.
>> How is a normal user doing an install expected to know what font
>> they are going to be using, anyway? Previously they could say "well,
>> I don't know enough about all this to want to customise anything, so
>> apparently I'll need Native hinting, whatever that is"; now they
>> need to *guess* that the default is some TrueType font they've never
>> heard of.
>>
>> (When it talks about Microsoft fonts, does that mean the ones from
>> the non-free msttcorefonts package that disappeared in Lenny?)
>
> Those are good questions/thoughts.
On further investigation I see there's still a contrib package named
ttf-mscorefonts-installer - not quite similar enough for my previous
search to catch it.
My other question, omitted to avoid making it look as if I thought I
knew anything about fonts, was "When it says TrueType, it probably
means as opposed to older formats, but what answer should I give if my
default font is fonts-freefont-otf or maybe fonts-localhomebrew-woff?
> The DejaVu -> Noto change in the font configuration was made upstream, and
> hit Debian with fontconfig 2.14. There were reactions:
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/1028643
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/1029390
>
> https://bugs.debian.org/1029237
>
> But nobody addressed those directly, and Debian 12 was released with some
> ambiguity. Debian was caught off guard.
>
> I attended to the fontconfig package only recently, and have taken a couple
> of steps to handle the situation. One thing is that the default monospace
> font was changed back to DejaVu recently, so now we have:
>
> sans-serif Noto Sans
> serif Noto Serif
> monospace DejaVu Sans Mono
>
> It is apparently likely that debian/fontconfig-config.templates will undergo
> further changes soon, so possibly I should wait a bit with dealing with
> those PO files.
>
> But I think we would need a 'font expert' to help get it right.
I'm not one of those. When people say "look at these screenshots of
how much worse it is!" I can rarely even tell which way round
"before" and "after" are meant to be...
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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