I think you misunderstood me. My point was NOT that the Google font or the CTAN fbb package are examples of appropriate source inclusion. I know full well that both of those organizations have their own admission standards. Rather my point was that having only TTF and not VFB is not an actual barrier to people wishing to edit the font the way having only binaries of an application would be. People both can and *have* used the TTF to edit this exact font multiple times.
My understanding is that that if someone converted the TTF to a FontForge project tomorrow, made a few changes, and submitted it to Debian as a new font, that would be admissable as long as they included the FontForge source files that they, as the new upstream, were working from. And that's even though those new source files would contain hardly any information not already in the TTF here. That's where I think strictly demanding that every existing package must have original font-editor files gets a little silly. Insisting that people never ever ignore and omit available font-editor files is supremely reasonable, but treating a font as something in the same category as a binary assembly blob if it never ever had that kind of sources publically available despite multiple people happily editing it from the TTF seems to me an unnecessarily narrow reading of "include source code". https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts/PackagingPolicy does not yet say *anything* about font source code and in fact gives and example of a font where the upstream consists of nothing but a TTF. https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts says that fonts should be built from source but makes no explicit ruling that only fonts with specific types of source are admissable. Regards, Timothy On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, 11:47 am Bastian Germann, <[email protected]> wrote: > Google does not operate under DFSG, so it is okay for them to treat TTF > as source even when there is an unpublished (other format) source. That > is not okay for Debian. The manual clearly states that the source is in > VFB format. > > Please do not point to other packages where similar things are the case. > This was handled very sloppily for some time unfortunately. > >
