On Monday, September 21, 2026 10:26:25 PM Mountain Standard Time Jérémy Lal wrote: > > It > > is unclear to me how essential they are to that documentation, but I would > > image that before an effort is made to completely remove them from Debian > > we > > probably want to have a larger discussion on debian-devel. > > EOT is an old web format that targeted IE <= 8. > It was never a source format. The font was in TTF and was converted to EOT > for IE8 support. > > We should keep the ability to convert from EOT (just in case). > > I would be very much surprised if those EOT files were still useful in any > way. > It would be a very good idea to get rid of them.
Looking at one example from the gimp-help-en package, it ships: gimp-help-en: /usr/share/gimp/3.0/help/en/images/fonts/open-sans-v13-latin- regular.eot gimp-help-en: /usr/share/gimp/3.0/help/en/images/fonts/open-sans-v13-latin- regular.svg gimp-help-en: /usr/share/gimp/3.0/help/en/images/fonts/open-sans-v13-latin- regular.ttf gimp-help-en: /usr/share/gimp/3.0/help/en/images/fonts/open-sans-v13-latin- regular.woff gimp-help-en: /usr/share/gimp/3.0/help/en/images/fonts/open-sans-v13-latin- regular.woff2 My guess is that upstream ships these binary fonts, and the Debian package just goes along with it. These accompany HTML files that are used for documentation. https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/extras/gimp-help/-/tree/debian/latest/ images/common/fonts?ref_type=heads The first problem here is that this package shouldn’t ship this font at all because the source package does not contain the source code for the fonts and it is not a font package. Rather, the Debian package should remove these fonts, depend on the fonts-open-sans package (assuming that is the same font), and symlink to the fonts that are shipped by that package. The second problem is that the fonts-open-sans package currently only ships TTF versions of the font. So, before the gimp-help-en package maintainer can do that, the fonts-open-sans maintainer needs to start generating and shipping WOFF and WOFF2 (and possibly SVG) versions of the font. Without looking at the code, my guess is that the accompanying HTML files auto select the font based on the browser’s capabilities. If that is the case, the EOT font is never actually called, because, to my knowledge, there is no HTML rendering engine in Debian that can display EOT fonts. So, this file could be safely dropped from the Debian package. Assuming that all of the above is true, perhaps we should create a lintian tag informing package maintainers that ship EOT fonts that there is no purpose for shipping an EOT font in Debian and it should be removed. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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