Please Allow unifont/1:7.0.06-1 (Unstable) to Migrate to Testing
Dear Release Team,
I am the maintainer of GNU Unifont, both upstream
(http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/unifont) and on Debian.
You've asked that people not email you unblocking requests unless
necessary. In this case, a release of Unifont that I packaged on 24
October (unifont/1:7.0.06-1) shows an override problem that might
prevent its automatic migration into Testing
(https://qa.debian.org/debcheck.php?dist=unstable&package=unifont).
I request that you let unifont/1:7.0.06-1 migrate in spite of that,
with the understanding that I will sort the issue out with the FTP
Masters in the near future. I filed an override bug for the FTP
Masters on 24 October to change the priority of unifont-bin, but have
gotten no reply from them
(https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=766699).
The version of Unifont in Testing (unifont/1:7.0.03-1) is not suitable
for Jessie because it uses liggd-gd2-noxpm-perl, which was removed
from Testing this summer. That library is now replaced by libgd-perl.
I only learned of that when I packaged unifont/1:7.0.05-1 on 19
October.
Because libgd-perl has priority "extra", I changed the priority of
unifont-bin from "optional" to "extra" to conform to Section 2.5 of
the Policy Manual. unifont-bin contains programs to modify Unifont
and to rebuild it from source files. Fewer than 200 systems report
having it installed on popcon
(https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=unifont); most users just
want to use the resulting fonts.
If you allow the Unstable version of Unifont to migrate to Testing in
two days (when it is 10 days old), the version in Testing will be
replaced and that problem will take care of itself.
The only other alternatives I can see if unifont-bin must remain with
priority "optional" are changing the priority of ligd-perl from
"extra" to "optional", or stripping Unifont of its Perl scripts that
manipulate PNG images. I can do the latter if you want, but I think
it would be a shame to cripple the Debian version of Unifont by
removing its ability to handle PNG images.
Apart from having complete coverage of the Unicode 7.0 Basic
Multilingual Plane, Unifont 7.0.x adds 25 Supplemental Multilingual
Plane (Unicode Plane 1) scripts that have no other representation in
Debian fonts (at least as of when they were added to Unifont),
according to https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts/UnicodeCoverage. Four of
these were added in the very latest release, unifont/1:7.0.06-1:
- Old Permic
- Ornamental Dingbats
- Geometric Shapes Extended
- Supplemental Arrows-C
If you have any other suggestions for getting this latest release into
Testing, please let me know.
Thank you,
Paul Hardy
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