On Sat, Sep 09, 2023 at 11:24:04PM +0200, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote: > After our conversation I made two installs for test purposes: > > 1. Debian 12 with GNOME > Result: fonts-noto-core was not included by default. > > 2. Debian trixie with GNOME > Result: fonts-noto-core was included by default. > > I suspect that the change can be explained by this commit: > https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/5aa10dde
There's a lot of Debian outside GNOME -- and in fact, if you are already using their metapackages, you don't need more. I'd prefer for non-GNOME metapackages to be universal, and thus what a particular desktop already depends or does not depend on is not a concern for me. Thus: OP's request is neither mooted nor vindicated by whatever GNOME does. > > Alas, noto has the downside of making font pickers next to useless, > > as it declares every single of languages it supports as a separate > > font family. So instead off just "Noto Sans" "Noto Mono" "Noto > > Slightly Serifed", you have "Noto Western Klingon" "Noto Eastern > > Klingon" and so on, making the list of available fonts one big noto > > fest. > > If you assume that users often want to change much, I can understand that > you see that as a disadvantage. OTOH, a user who wants to do it differently > can uninstall fonts-noto-core and with that get a significantly shorter > list. Noted. You don't care about fonts just whether a particular character is covered, me and other people in the Fonts Team obviously have more interest in distinct fonts. That's the diff between eg. linguists vs layout designers, different people have different priorities. > Myself is involved in changing the default selection of fonts and font > configuration for Ubuntu. In that context we focus on offering the users a > sensible default Aye! > which most users are comfortable with, and the way Noto > provides different fonts for different scripts and purposes is an advantage > to achieve that Ubuntu is about to prefer Noto for most scripts, but to the > extent exceptions proves to be motivated, that can be handled relatively > easy via font configuration. As this metapackage was written by me, I'm kind of concerned I use "royal we" too much and say stuff about the opinions of Debian Fonts team more than warranted -- but, with paragraph^^ above, perhaps the description and the focus of this metapackage could be changed, to explicitly cater to a different audience? Having multiple metapackages do essentially the same thing is kind of redundant. > Something that would have been harder with > DejaVu Sans as the preferred font. DejaVu has a decent but not universal coverage; it's included on the list more for technical legacy reasons, just like Windows-compatible fonts are. > I have no firm opinion, at least not yet, on the role of fonts-recommended > and whether the proposed change is motivated. But I just posted a list > message about the ongoing transition from DejaVu to Noto, to reach a broader > audience: > https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/09/msg00053.html I'm behind reading mailing lists, but I agree 100% with what other members of the Fonts Team said. Noto is ugly, a bit too disk heavy for 60% of keyboard-attached boxen I use, and pollutes font lists too much. Besides, Noto can be said to be a metapackage by itself, providing a large set of fonts -- even if it claims to be a single font, it presents hundreds of them to the system and UI interfaces. Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Elemental clouds: ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ • earth: cumulogranite (aviation) ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ • fire: pyrocumulus (forestry, volcanism) ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ No known relations of clouds to air or water.
