On Wed, 20 May 2026, Philipp Kern wrote: > I feel like if this is the answer and SVG are perfectly fine to be > treated as the preferred form of modification - then I don't > understand why we are not just shipping them. If we (and users) can > feasibly modify the files to patch the font, I feel like the holier > than thou stance of "yes, we just happen to know that there's a > proprietary toolchain to generate these, but only because upstream > told us" is not very helpful.
There may still be practical concerns here that matter; if the only issues are theoretical, then what's distributed is source enough for Debian's purposes. We should (almost) always be looking at preferred form for making modifications, not just a form having feasibility of modification. Not distributing the upstream source used to build the SVG (if there is such a thing) typically means that the Debian maintainers and users have to expend more effort to fix issues in the fonts (or make derivative works of the fonts) than an upstream who has access to that source and the build toolchain. That said, if the there's a reversible transform that can turn the SVG into the equivalent of the "upstream source" (say if the upstream source was some kind of proprietary vector format like adobe illustrator) or if the SVG is what the upstream now uses to modify the font for any kind of modification, then the SVG is now the source. -- Don Armstrong https://www.donarmstrong.com [T]he question of whether Machines Can Think, [...] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim. -- Edsger W. Dijkstra "The threats to computing science"
