Re: Change of templates file in fontconfig-config

Thanks for your reply, Justin!

On 2023-09-04 08:19, Justin B Rye wrote:
> Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>> I made a minor — but important — change to the
>> debian/fontconfig-config.templates file in the fontconfig source
>> package:
>> 
>> https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/45d8eda0
>>
>> That created fuzzy items in the PO files. I saw the reference to
>> this list in the file, so this is a heads-up. Not sure how a
>> change like this is expected to be further processed.
> 
> debian-l10n-english is the one part of the debian-i18n hierarchy
> where there's no work to be done; it's all the other languages that
> still have the bit in parentheses.

Right. Probably the comment at the top of the file, where 
debian-l10n-english is mentioned, should be altered or dropped.

> Maybe this is a case where you can safely pick out and delete those
> bits and declare it unfuzzied, without needing to be fluent in Urdu
> and so on?

Unless somebody objects, I may do that.

> I'm Ccing d-i18n for any input.

Thanks for broadening the audience.

> Mind you, if fontconf-confontconfig-config now has a different
> default font, why do the package dependencies still have dejavu as
> first preference?

That's true in Debian 12, but not in testing:

https://salsa.debian.org/freedesktop-team/fontconfig/-/commit/5aa10dde

> If you aren't running plasma or cinnamon, almost nothing seems to
> pull in fonts-noto - not even fonts-recommended.

Well, fonts-noto-core is recommended by the libreoffice binary, which 
means that Noto is effectively default in Debian 12 also with the GNOME 
desktop.

> How is a normal user doing an install expected to know what font
> they are going to be using, anyway?  Previously they could say "well,
> I don't know enough about all this to want to customise anything, so
> apparently I'll need Native hinting, whatever that is"; now they
> need to *guess* that the default is some TrueType font they've never
> heard of.
> 
> (When it talks about Microsoft fonts, does that mean the ones from
> the non-free msttcorefonts package that disappeared in Lenny?)

Those are good questions/thoughts.

The DejaVu -> Noto change in the font configuration was made upstream, 
and hit Debian with fontconfig 2.14. There were reactions:

https://bugs.debian.org/1028643

https://bugs.debian.org/1029390

https://bugs.debian.org/1029237

But nobody addressed those directly, and Debian 12 was released with 
some ambiguity. Debian was caught off guard.

I attended to the fontconfig package only recently, and have taken a 
couple of steps to handle the situation. One thing is that the default 
monospace font was changed back to DejaVu recently, so now we have:

sans-serif   Noto Sans
serif        Noto Serif
monospace    DejaVu Sans Mono

It is apparently likely that debian/fontconfig-config.templates will 
undergo further changes soon, so possibly I should wait a bit with 
dealing with those PO files.

But I think we would need a 'font expert' to help get it right.