On 2023-09-10 13:53, Adam Borowski wrote:
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.
I used GNOME as an example, since we had talked about the GNOME desktop
at the debian-l10n-english mailing list.
I installed Debian trixie again, but chose Xfce this time instead of
GNOME. fonts-noto-core is there.
$ fc-match
NotoSans-Regular.ttf: "Noto Sans" "Regular"
And fonts-dejavu-core is *not* there. The task-* meta packages are
apparently of limited importance in this context, at least for latin
scripts.
So the linked fontconfig change seems to affect the whole Debian
irrespective of desktop environment. fontconfig-config is included in
the base install, before the desktop components are selected and installed.
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.
True. Personal preferences play an important role, and discussions on
this topic tend to be complex for that reason.
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.
Noted. I will post to debian-devel soon again with some clarifications.
The initial reactions are not overwhelmingly positive. :/
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.
That's entirely a result of the way the Noto fonts are packaged in
Debian, and not something that should be attributed to Noto itself.
Discussed at https://bugs.debian.org/983291 .
--
Gunnar
