On Sat, 5 Oct 2019 10:46:03 +0100, Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> wrote: > On Sat, 05 Oct 2019 at 11:02:00 +0200, Stephen Kitt wrote: > > It’s not ideal, since the dependency isn’t strong, but > > policy says packages can’t depend on font packages — which makes sense in > > X since the fonts can be served remotely. (See > > https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-depends-on-an-x-font-package.html > > for details.) > > Does this recommendation still make sense? It certainly *used to be* > the case that font rendering (and a lot of other rendering) was done > server-side on the X server, possibly with fonts served by a remote > font server like the xfstt package; but my understanding is that this > decade, toolkits like GTK and Qt normally do their rendering locally > and are responsible for loading their own fonts, mostly via fontconfig > and freetype.
Right, it probably doesn’t make much sense any more. Ironically, the situation is better now than it was a few years ago when X font servers stopped being popular and before fontconfit and Freetype became commonplace: with the latter, there are fallbacks which usually work reasonably well (at least, well enough to get some text on the screen), whereas X programs which ask for a specific font (such as Koules here) typically break if the X server doesn’t have the font... I’ll open a bug against policy. Regards, Stephen
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