Hi all,
Am 07.02.2021 22:51, schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
Added now explicitly.
well, thanks. I can't wait to participate in this discussion.
My stance on this: In theory it should be technically possible to
replace the gsfonts (and gsfonts-x11) package with fonts-urw-base35 and
I believe this would be the right step, given that the latter font set
is actively maintained and extended - and actually used by ghostscript
both upstream and in Debian. And as a matter of fact, I have prepared
this transition since I uploaded the fonts-urw-base35 package for the
first time. So, why haven't I triggered this transition yet?
First, we have packaged the urwcyr fork in the gsfonts package which has
added cyrillic glyphs to most (all?) fonts and I have been told that we
set parts of official Debian documentation with these fonts, and this
includes translations into languages which depend on the presence of
cyrillic glyphs. Granted, nowadays there are dozens of alternative fonts
available in Debian that provide these glyphs. Anyway, back then when I
proposed the transition I have been told to please wait. I guess it was
late in a release cycle...
Second, I have never experienced any "name space clash" in real life. In
my experience, fonts are either selected directly by file path or by
means of fontconfig. And the latter has sophisticated heuristics to
return "the right font" for a given search pattern. If it finds two
fonts with the same name, it chooses the one with a higher version
number or glyph count or whatever. I don't know if there is some special
case that ghostscript can't properly handle, though.
So, to summarize: Yes, I think we should replace gsfonts+gsfonts-x11
with fonts-urw-base35 at a given time and this transition is already
prepared for the most part. But I don't see this as a pressing issue
right now, given the lack of real-world issues this apparently causes,
given the lack of bug reports we received during the past 5 years - and
given how late in the release cycle we are to introduce a potentially
disruptive change like this.
Cheers,
- Fabian
PS: Also, please note that there is a third (outdated) copy of the same
fonts available in the texlive-fonts-recommended package which the TeX
people want to keep, though, for TeX reasons I guess.
