Bug#491647: debian-policy: X font policy unclear around TTF fonts
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.8.0.1
Severity: minor
Pasting in my last reply from a discussion outside of the BTS:
The section in the policy manual on X fonts is only for fonts delivered
over the X protocol, and hence doesn't apply to TrueType fonts. I agree
that this is not horribly clear at the moment, in part because it's stated
in a footnote:
For the purposes of Debian Policy, a "font for the X Window System" is
one which is accessed via X protocol requests. Fonts for the Linux
console, for PostScript renderer, or any other purpose, do not fit
this definition. Any tool which makes such fonts available to the X
Window System, however, must abide by this font policy.
This was all written before TrueType fonts were widely used for X and
didn't anticipate them, but in context the intention of this section is to
only apply to the sorts of fonts that you'd list in the FontPath directive
in your xorg.conf.
Policy needs some wording adjustment here to make this more clear. It's
caused a fair bit of confusion lately.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
-- no debconf information
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