On Fri, 03 Feb 2023 at 11:49:34 +0100, Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote: > I chose to set "Monospace" when needed instead of specifying "DejaVu Sans > Mono" explicitly.
You said in the new patch that fontconfig prefers DejaVu Sans Mono as its implementation of Monospace in Arabic-script locales. To confirm, is that true upstream, or just in Debian/Ubuntu, or just in Ubuntu? > * Consider an Arabic Debian user who opens Tweaks and picks some beautiful > monospace font with e.g. the text editor in mind. With the patch applied, > that user would not screw up the rendering of Arabic in gnome-terminal > unknowingly. Equally, if another Arabic-speaking Debian user opens Tweaks and picks a monospace font that *does* work OK in vte terminals, they would be surprised and probably consider it to be a bug for gnome-terminal not to respect that preference? > * With the patch also in Debian, we avoid to add to the Ubuntu/Debian delta, > which is always desirable. :) If it's good enough for Debian, is it good enough for upstream? Avoiding adding to the Debian/upstream delta is at least as valuable as avoiding adding to the Ubuntu/Debian delta. Or if it's not suitable for upstream, I think we should only apply it in Debian if the benefit *to Debian* is worth the cost of divergence from upstream. The GNOME team already has too many places where someone applied a patch several years ago, none of us know whether it's safe to remove, and it's adding maintenance cost every time we update to a upstream release. This is particularly problematic for areas like localization into a specific language or script, which relatively few people understand in detail. I spent a significant amount of time doing the research that led to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/183 eventually being fixed upstream, 10+ years after the change was made in Debian... but I wouldn't have had to spend time digging up the reasoning if the change had been proposed upstream at the time! Thanks, smcv
