Bug#1002717: Please break the big package into smaller packages according to the language

[Paride Legovini <paride@debian.org>]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

On Tue, 4 Jan 2022 Amr Ibrahim <amribrahim1987@hotmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Dec 2021 21:52:01 +0100 Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>
> wrote:
> 
> > Could you please describe your use case?  I don't quite see what
> > screen-equipped machines would care about mere 40MB.  This stands in
> > contrast to embedded or containers where space might be at premium,
> > sometimes as low as 256MB.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> My use case is of typical desktop use:
> 
> - Changing the default font of the desktop environment
> - Choosing a font in a LibreOffice document
> 
> It is the annoyance of going through the big list of useless fonts
> (from my point of view) in LibreOffice in order to find a good font for
> the three languages that I use: English, German and Arabic.

Hi Amr and thanks for your suggestion.

The sweet spot between splitting packages so one can install exactly
what's needed and making things discoverable and straightforward is
sometimes not obvious and not the same for everybody.

For font packages I think that having a single package installing
everything upstream intended makes sense, and I agree with Adam in his
considerations on disk space utilization. In other words, while being
open for further discussion, I'm -1 for the per-language split.

I could be more positive on splitting out the web fonts
(/usr/share/fonts-ibm-plex/*), as my impression is that nothing/nobody
is using them, but even here I'm not sure it's really worth it.

Paride