Dear all,
On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 06:39:10PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 05:52:49PM +0100, Nathan Willis wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > I may have missed something in here, but how do you know that the SVGs in
> > the
> > font are not the source SVGs?
>
> Hi Nathan!
>
> Good question; I'm not sure we do. The SVG font file
> (fontawesome-webfont.svg) begins:
> [...]
>
> So perhaps this is the original source for the font. FontForge is
> quite happy to open it and allow editing, and this would not be a
> reason to consider FontAwesome 4.7.0 to be non-DFSG free.
> [...]
> Looking further at FontAwesome 4.7.0:
>
> * fontawesome-webfont.{eot,ttf} and FontAwesome.otf all contain the
> string "FONTLAB:OTFEXPORT", so presumably these were generated by
> FontLab (non-free software)
>
> * I don't know how to uncompress the .woff/.woff2 files to see if
> there is any identifying information there. But my guess is that
> these were also generated using FontLab.
> [...]
Thinking more about it, how about the following transition process?
* Strip all of the fontawesome-webfont.* and FontAwesome.otf files
from the source package except for the SVG one.
* Regenerate all of these fonts using FontForge; here's a simple
script that will do fine with a little tweaking:
-----
#!/usr/bin/python3
import fontforge
SVG = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.svg"
TTF = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.ttf"
WOFF = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.woff"
WOFF2 = "/tmp/fontawesome-webfont.woff2"
OTF = "/tmp/FontAwesome.otf"
fa = fontforge.open(SVG)
fa.copyright = "Copyright Dave Gandy 2016. All rights reserved."
fa.version = "4.7.0"
fa.sfntRevision = 4.007
fa.ascent = 1536
fa.descent = 256
for font in [TTF, WOFF, WOFF2, OTF]:
fa.generate(font)
-----
Note that this does not generate the EOT font; that is fine, as it is
specific to Internet Explorer and is not needed for Microsoft Edge, so
is not needed on Debian systems (unless they are serving to old MS
Windows machines). If really needed, we could generate that too using
eot-utils.
Then my suggestion is that fonts-font-awesome-legacy stores its fonts
in /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome (not
/usr/share/fonts-font-awesome-legacy), and includes FontAwesom 4.7.0
(with this minor change). The control fields will be roughly, for the
time being:
Package: fonts-font-awesome-legacy
Conflicts and Replaces: fonts-font-awesome (<< 7)
contains FontAwesome versions 4.7.0, 5.x, 6.x
Package: fonts-font-awesome
Version: 7.x
Depends: fonts-font-awesome-legacy
contains FontAwesome version 7.x
Once these are both in testing, we file normal severity bugs against
all packages that build-depend or depend on fonts-font-awesome asking
them to either switch to fonts-font-awesome-legacy or to ensure that
their package will continue to work with fonts-font-awesome 7.x, and
close the bug when they have done so. Then in forky+1 (or perhaps
sooner), we can drop the fonts-font-awesome ->
fonts-font-awesome-legacy dependency.
Thoughts before I proceed?
Best wishes,
Julian
