Bug#1135180: Bug#902981: DFSG status of fonts-font-awesome (was: Re: Bug#902981: new upstream (5.1.0))

On Wed, May 13, 2026 at 10:29 PM Julian Gilbey <[email protected]> wrote:

that the package as-is is actually not DFSG-free in the same way that
> the 5.x version isn't: there is no "source code".  And 4.x is even
> worse than 5.x: while the SVG sources are included in the GitHub
> repository in version 5.1.0 upwards (first committed to the repository
> in June 2018), they do not appear before that, so there is no hope of
>


> making a DFSG-free build of FontAwesome 4.7.0.  (The SVG sources are
> embedded in the SVG font, but that is not the original source of the
> icons.)
>

I may have missed something in here, but how do you know that the SVGs in
the font are not the source SVGs?

In most other SVG-in-OT fonts I have seen, there is not much done to input
SVGs before they are added to the `SVG ` table. The Adobe builder kind of
halfheartedly compacts them (just shrinking whitespace runs), but even it
doesn't do a full spec-compliance "cleaning" stage or so on. And that's for
real emoji fonts, too, where they arguably have more validation to worry
about.

My proposal is therefore the following:
>
> - FontAwesome 4.7.0 should be dropped from Debian completely.  This is
>   a big deal, though; over 500 packages in testing ship
>   fontawesome-webfont.woff2  But if I've read the situation correctly,
>   that is the direction we should be heading in, though that's far
>   beyond my capacity to manage.  See below for some further thoughts
>   on this.
>
> - fonts-font-awesome is upgraded to version 7.x of the upstream font,
>   in TTF and WOFF2 formats, using a home-grown DFSG-free build system
>   (courtesy of Roland Mas and Yadd, who wrote this for the
>   node-fortawesome-fontawesome-free package); this package will no
>   longer contain any other formats of the font, nor any CSS/LESS/JS
>   code.
>

Can you provide a link to this tool? Or was there one earlier in the thread
that I may just have missed? That's tangential; I just hadn't encountered
it.

Thanks,
Nate


-- 
nathan.p.willis
[email protected] <http://identi.ca/n8>