[this was in reference to my X font policy proposal vis a vis bitchx, which ships a couple of X fonts with it] On Mon, Jan 24, 2000 at 03:43:50PM -0800, Darren O. Benham wrote: > Well... either or... > > Spell it out in the policy so that console apps provide a package that > doesn't DEPEND on xbase-clients... either by requiring two packages, on > that does and one that doesn't... or by encasing the required font-calls in > if statements like update-menus... An X font package cannot be meaningfully installed without the support of the tools in xbase-clients. That's the reason that big long policy proposal was written in the first place. We needed a way to let multiple packages install fonts into the same directories without stepping all over each other's .dir, .scale, and .alias data, and making life hell for the X user. So X font packages will have to depend on a recent version of xbase-clients. As far as the situation with console apps depending on xbase-clients goes, things are constrained by existing policy. Existing policy says that if your package can be configured to support X, it must be. Breaking the X support out into a separate package is not allowed. I made a proposal to lower the bar a little bit (packages that qualify for standard or higher priority may separate out their X-dependent components, or be provided in X and non-X versions), but it is currently mired by objections and wouldn't affects bitchx anyway. The best fix is for bitchx to not bundle those X fonts with it, but instead provide the fonts in a separate package. I used to use bitchx, and I know that it doesn't *need* those particular fonts to function (it just spawns an xterm with a bunch of options, plus -fn vga or whatever). So I submit that bitchx should split out its X *fonts* into a separate package. How about xfonts-cp437-misc? (-misc because they're character cell, and cp437 because they use IBM code page 437 encoding, not an ISO encoding which is more common for the X Window System.) In IRC you asked me to make this part of the policy proposal, so I will do so, and post my amendment here. > If either is written in, I gladly revoke my objections because I agree with > the concept... Is the above acceptable to you? -- G. Branden Robinson | The basic test of freedom is perhaps Debian GNU/Linux | less in what we are free to do than in branden@ecn.purdue.edu | what we are free not to do. roger.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ | -- Eric Hoffer
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