Hi Steve, On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 09:44:54AM +0200, Steve White wrote: > The current ttf-freefont consists of exactly: > CVS freefont 20060501 > the patches from Cristian's bug reports, as on the freefont bug page > > (I hope to confirm that by looking at the Debian packages and changelogs) yes > There are two extremes > > * One is to insist on total artistic integrity. This is attainable > only whe a single designer with great understanding of typographic > issues works on a font. For a Unicode font containing many scripts, > there is no single person who could do this. that's what Dejavu people are trying to achieve > * The other is to just try to fill every character slot in Unicode. > This will result at best in a very ugly mess, and in reality, a > useless mess. Many scripts are unreadable unless the spacing of > characters is adjusted according to their position in the text. But > even then, unless text from different scripts "goes together" somehow, > what is the point of it being in the same font? A font should consist > of glyphs that look good together in text. Also, most people will > avoid using an ugly font. > > A balance has to be struck, somehow. I'm trying to work this out myself. ok > > > If that is right, my question is, what is your advice on how to move > > > those fixes back into the FreeFont version control system? > > > > IMHO it would be great if you could interate the existing patches into a new > > release which would be used as starting point for your future work. > > > My question is, *how* to achieve this. > > There are several technical problems, aside from the question of what > changes were made. > you have commit access to the repository? > Freefont's base format is the FontForge SFD format. The Debian > packages are TrueType. That would be very helpful to have the SFD > files that generate these. Debian ships pre-compiled binary packages (deb/udeb) ready for direct installation but makes the sources available as well for people who want to rebuild the packages themselves; > > At http://packages.debian.org/sid/ttf-freefont-udeb, I found > # [ttf-freefont_20060501cvs.orig.tar.gz] > # [ttf-freefont_20060501cvs-12.diff.gz] > Am I correct in thinking these are the original freefont CVS and the > diffs on that CVS that produce the latest ttf-freefont package? souce package consists of ttf-freefont_20060501cvs.orig.tar.gz as shipped upstream (i.e. from you), and of ttf-freefont_20060501cvs-12.diff.gz; this file contains all the debian specific stuff, including Christian patches. When you want to rebuild, you just assemble the two files before rebuilding; separating the upstream sources from the debian specif, has various advantages. When you rebuild the package, you end up with deb/udeb binary packages: deb packages contain ttf files, defoma file, and some doumentation udeb package are a stripped version of the previous to be used in the debian-installer debian systems use deb packages to install the software The typical workflow is the following: 1. Upstream (i.e. you) ships a new version 2. somebody (me) grabs the source tarball, adds debian-specific stuff and prepares a new debian package 3. Christian (who is a Debian Developer) uploads it making it available to the entire world There's a lot more of course; the point is that the last upstream snapshot available is 20060501cvs. After that, Christian prepared a set of patches which have not yet been merged upstream as to produce a newer version.IMHO you should check those patches and integrate them in the official freefont repository as a first step. Hope I answered the right questions. Specific documentation about debian packages can of course be found on the official page (www.debian.org) and around the web. Ciao, Davide
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