Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/fonts/dejavu-ttf

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 07/27, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 02:04:10PM -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> > On 07/25, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > > Everybody else has been quiet.  I'd like to hear from others about the
> > > big picture issue here.
> > 
> > One more comment (sorry, this will probably muddle things): I don't
> > really like it that a TrueType font package depends on anything X11;
> > that's an incorrect dependency, IMO.  I don't know the ins and outs of
> > all font formats, so I'm talking just about TrueType here, but if there
> > are pkgsrc font packages for fonts in formats other than TrueType that
> > do not have an inherent coupling with X11, I don't think they should
> > depend on anything X11 either.
> 
> Well, in principle all fonts should depend on fontconfig and explicitly
> call fc-cache on installation. That would essentially pull in the same
> set of dependencies too.

Would depending on fontconfig pull in X11 things?  Having a font package
depend on something specifically for X11 is the thing I'm saying seems
like an incorrect dependency.  The fontconfig website

  https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/fontconfig/

says, "Fontconfig does not depend on the X Window System in any fashion,
so that printer-only applications do not have such dependencies."

> Frankly, this whole discussion is somewhat ridiculous to me given the
> size of the dependencies compared to Perl itself.

Certainly I agree if all we're considering is the size of the
dependencies.  In that case, yes, there's not really anything worth
discussing here.

However, I'm saying that the dependency on X11 seems incorrect,
regardless of the size of the dependencies.  But maybe that's trying
to be too perfect here.  Maybe since the dependencies are small in
total size, and it works OK in practice, and dependencies for all other
supported windowing systems like Wayland and macOS's Quartz could be
added as well for all font packages without adding too much to the total
size, it's fine and should be left alone.

That last part is what I'm concerned about, though: it sounds like right
now each font package has (or should have) a direct dependency on the
tools needed to prepare or register the fonts for *all* the supported
windowing systems regardless of whether those windowing systems are
installed or used.  It feels like a design that won't scale well to
a large number of windowing systems (or to a windowing system where
the font prepare-and-register tool dependencies are large in size thus
causing pain for users).  But maybe that situation will never occur, so
it doesn't matter.

Lewis