On 10 September 2023 2:38:38 am IST, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunna...@debian.org>
wrote:
>Hi!
>
>With fontconfig 2.14, which entered testing last January, upstream fontconfig
>prefers Noto over DejaVu in /etc/fonts/conf.d/60-latin.conf. The change was
>not preceded by any discussion I'm aware of. It appears to be related to this
>Fedora measure:
>
>https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultToNotoFonts
>
>So Debian was kind of caught off guard.
>
>My personal view is that it is a change in the right direction, and I have
>taken a couple of follow-up steps in Debian. There are still loose ends and
>more work to be done to achieve a consistent configuration in this respect.
>However, before taking further steps, I feel there is a need to reach out to a
>broader audience about the change. Hence this message. Basically I'm asking if
>this move towards Noto is desirable and, if so, I plea for relevant input for
>the completion of the transition.
>
>While this message was crossposted to several mailing lists, since the topic
>affects multiple packages and teams, I suggest that the replies are posted to
>the general debian-devel list only.
>
>
>The current situation
>---------------------
>From a Debian POV, the effective default font for sans-serif and serif depends
>on whether the fonts-noto-core package is installed or not. For some desktop
>environments that package is pulled by default. As regards the GNOME desktop,
>fonts-noto-core is not installed by default with Debian 12 stable, but it does
>get pulled if you install trixie via a weekly build ISO.
>
>The change as regards GNOME is probably my fault:
>
>https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/5aa10dde
>
>While I thought that that commit wouldn't change much in practice, since there
>typically are other fonts which satisfy the fontconfig-config alternative
>dependency list, it probably does make a difference since fontconfig is
>installed early during the installation process.
>
>Some bugs were filed early this year, where people expressed some
>dissatisfaction. The strongest objections were about the change of the
>monospace font. (fonts-noto-mono is included by default also in Debian 12
>stable with GNOME.) So I addressed that in trixie via a Debian level patch
>which changes the default monospace font back to DejaVu Sans Mono.
>
>So at this time we have these preferences in 60-latin.conf:
>
>sans-serif Noto Sans
>serif Noto Serif
>monospace DejaVu Sans Mono
>
>So far so good. Mostly good IMHO. I can mention that I'm also working with
>fonts in Ubuntu, and similar changes will happen in Ubuntu 23.10.
>
>
>Some steps to consider
>----------------------
>These are some points for consideration I have in mind:
>
>* The task-* packages should be reconsidered. At first hand I'm thinking of
>all the non-latin task-* packages which recommend a particular font. Let's
>take task-hindi-desktop as an example, which currently recommends
>fonts-lohit-deva. I think it would be consistent to change that to:
>
>Recommends: fonts-noto-core | fonts-lohit-deva
>
>fonts-noto-core covers "all" scripts, so with that package installed there
>shouldn't be a need to install fonts-lohit-deva. (And for many non-latin
>scripts Noto offers better quality than the other non-latin font packages in
>the archive.)
For Malayalam, we prefer traditional script font by default. Noto Malayalam
coverage is not in traditional script.
>* Maybe it would be motivated to recommend fonts-noto-core in the umbrella
>package task-desktop too. While fontconfig-config seems to pull
>fonts-noto-core for new installs, I suspect that it wouldn't be pulled during
>an upgrade to Debian trixie.
>
>* System admins have the option to do "dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config" and
>that way control some fontconfig symlinks affecting things like hinting and
>subpixel rendering. As regards the related templates file I recently made a
>tiny change that appeared to be necessary:
>
>https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/45d8eda0
>
>but I suspect that the feature may need an overhaul also in other respects if
>we change the default font.
>
>* I've noticed the fonts-recommended bug https://bugs.debian.org/1051314,
>which rightly points out the need to consider Noto in that context.
>
>* Almost 3 years have passed since the fonts-noto source package was last
>updated from upstream. A new update with latest upstream is desirable.
>
>
>Looking forward to your response.
>
--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
