I have a question for the Debian Fonts mailing list regarding the correct way to package WOFF2 (or WOFF or other web font formats). As background, a number of applications in Debian include fonts as part of their upstream tarballs. Generally, it is considered best to remove these fonts from the Debian packages and depend instead on the appropriate Debian font package. In the case of web applications, in recent years the use of WOFF and WOFF2 fonts have become common. WOFF and WOFF2 are compressed versions of TTF and OTF fonts. There are a number of tools in Debian that can perform these conversions, like woff2_compress or sfnt2woff-zopfli.
There are a number of fonts packages in Debian that already ship WOFF or WOFF2 fonts. Sometimes they do this in separate binary packages (offen suffixed by -web) and other times they do this in the same binary package that ships the TTF and OTF fonts. For example: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fonts-dejavu https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fonts-atkinson-hyperlegible https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fonts-tlwg https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fonts-materialdesignicons-webfont I maintain the redmine package, which is a web application that ships several WOFF2 versions of NotoSans in the upstream tarball. I filed #1116004 requesting that fonts-noto start shipping WOFF2 versions of their fonts so I could stop shipping them in redmine. The bug report went unanswered for a while until a DM named Manuel Guerra prepared an MR that added a new binary package named fonts-noto-web. This MR was posted to the bug report, at which point one of the maintainers of fonts-noto, Jonas Smedegaard, responded to the bug report suggesting one of the utilities for converting TTF to WOFF2. Alexandre Detiste reviewed Manuel Guerra’s MR and sponsored it as a team upload. After the upload, Jonas Smedegaard objected to the changes, reverting them entirely with the next upload. I believe this was the first time than anyone involved had any indication that he was displeased in any way with what was being done. The core of his objection appears to be that he thinks some other package should produce the WOFF2 fonts instead of fonts-noto. He expresses this here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1116004#95 My understanding is that there is a consensus in Debian that fonts should generally be shipped only by font packages, and that those fonts should be installed under /usr/share/fonts/. This is reflected in the following lintain tags: https://udd.debian.org/lintian-tag/font-in-non-font-package https://udd.debian.org/lintian-tag/font-outside-font-dir Jonas’ opinion is that this only applies to font formats like TTF and OTF, not WOFF and WOFF2, even though these two lintian tags flag against the WOFF2 fonts in redmine. https://udd.debian.org/lintian/? email1=&email2=&email3=&packages=redmine&ignpackages=&format=html<_error=on<_warning=on<_information=on&lintian_tag=#all My questions for the mailing list are these: 1. Is there a general consensus in Debian that WOFF2 and other web fonts should be shipped by font packages (when there is a need for them) and that they should be installed under /usr/share/fonts/? 2. If not, what is the recommended way for these fonts to be packaged? -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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