Fabian,
Thank you for your response.
On Monday, February 26, 2024 1:58:44 PM MST Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> > After doing some research I decided to name the source package fonts-
> > adobe-source-sans and the binary package fonts-adobe-source-sans-3.�
>
> I'd call both the source and the binary package fonts-adobe-source-
> sans, i.e. without the trailing '-3'. Chances are very low that we will
> have different versions of the same font packaged in Debian at the same
> time and I can't imagine a situation which would require two different
> versions of the same font installed at the same time.
My hesitancy for doing that is that the names of the fonts will change. For example, 'SourceSans3-Regular.otf' will become 'SourceSans4-Regular.otf'. This has already happened once, when the fonts changed from 'SourceSansPro-Regular.otf' to 'SourceSans3-Regular.otf'.
This seems like an insanely bad idea, which is the consensus of everyone who commented on the original change. But upstream seems undeterred.
https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-sans/issues/192
Shipping the fonts in a binary package that changes when the name of the fonts themselves changes makes it easier for packages that depend on the font to be aware of the change and modify themselves accordingly. For example, I maintain the electrum package. It uses a bundled version of this font for rendering purposes. The python code is looking for a file named 'SourceSansPro-Bold.otf'. I am planning to patch this code to look for 'SourceSans3-Bold.otf' and then submit a request upstream to bundle the newer version of the font with the new name (which bundled font I can then remove, but no longer need to modify the name of the font in the code). Having the binary package name change when the names of the fonts that ship change makes it much easier for packages in Debian that depend on this font for their UI to notice the change and alter their code to look for the new font compared to if the binary package stopped shipping existing font files without a name change.
However, if the general font packaging community thinks it would be best to used an unversion binary package name for the sake of conformity we could do that instead and just include a NEWS item every time the major version changes (which hopefully is not very often).
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org
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