On Saturday, October 10, 2026 10:38:38 AM Mountain Standard Time Jan Claeys wrote: > On Tue, 2026-10-06 at 08:33 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > > On Monday, October 5, 2026 8:43:24 AM Mountain Standard Time Jan > > > > Claeys wrote: > > > On Fri, 2026-10-02 at 21:16 -0700, Soren Stoutner wrote: > > > > There appears to be no use for EOT fonts in Debian (Debian has no > > > > packages that can display them, no modern browser on the web can > > > > display them). > > > > > > The only use case I can still see is if you have web content that > > > needs to be displayed with a specific font on embedded/IoT Windows > > > clients (e.g. some industrial barcode scanners/tablets), which > > > appears to be the only platform where IE is still supported. > > I should say that many such devices run Android nowadays.
That’s a good point. > > That is a good point. Looking over the list of EOT fonts attached to > > the grandparent email, do you see any that you think might be > > targeting embedded/IoT Windows clients? > > I don't know all of those packages, but anything that is only > documentation I wouldn't worry about removing EOT (and possibly SVG > fonts too). The problem with these EOT fonts in document packages is that they are DFSG- non-free because they are not built from source (and these packages do not even contain the source). They are included as binary font files in upstream tarballs and passed along during the packaging process. The only DFSG-free way to ship an EOT font is in a font package, with the TTF or OTF variant of the font being built from source and then compressed into an EOT font using mkeot, which is part of the eot-utils package. Jérémy Lal has proposed removing eot-utils from Debian unless there ends up being some use for EOT fonts we haven’t yet considered. > ERP software like Tryton maybe? > > In general, upstream for each package would be the best place to get an > answer, so maybe the policy (and maybe the linter) can suggest that? Yes. If we decide to move forward with having lintian recommend removal of EOT fonts, I would hope that package maintainers contact upstream to recommend they be removed there. -- Soren Stoutner [email protected]
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