On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 01:07:56AM -0700, Paul Hardy wrote: > BDF font files have not been allowed in Debian packages for a while, > as per Debian policy. I emailed Russ Allbery last year about the > possibility of allowing BDF fonts back into Debian for reasons that > follow. He was willing to entertain the idea. I waited for the lenny > release before bringing up this possible change in policy.
Hello Paul, I would like to clarify that BDF are not allowed in *binary* package, but are allowed in *source* package. > Currently BDF fonts are supposed to be converted to PCF. BDF is a > plain ASCII format, and PCF is binary. Thus a PCF font file will be > more compact than its BDF source. > > However, the original BDF version can contain ASCII comments that are > not preserved in the PCF version. These comments often contain > information such as author, copyright, and licensing information. > With the BDF versions discarded, that information is lost -- there is > no round-trip conversion from BDF to PCF to BDF. Thus a blind > BDF-to-PCF conversion can discard valuable information the author > intended to remain with the font. This can be significant given the > abundance of BDF fonts in the early history of X11. I fail to see the difference between a BDF-to-PCF converter and a C compiler that will discard comments from the C source files. Yet we do not generally ship C source code in binary packages. Users that need the BDF files can get it from the source package, so its is not lost to the user. Furthermore a cursory use of zless on some pcf.gz in debian seems to show that copyright information *are* preserved. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org