Re: Change of templates file in fontconfig-config

On 2023-09-04 20:56, Justin B Rye wrote:
> Gunnar Hjalmarsson wrote:
>> On 2023-09-04 08:19, Justin B Rye wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> Well, *most* changes to template text need to go through d-l-e on
> their way to translators, this is just one where we get to take a
> shortcut.

Ack.

>> 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.
> 
> It's a surprisingly tenuous dependency chain for something we might
> want to rely on; I didn't have fonts-noto-core installed anywhere,
> probably because I had noticed how many things libreoffice pulled in
> and was sceptical about any functionality I was ever going to use
> requiring *both* -dejavu *and* -noto.
> 
> Wait a minute... gnome-desktop depends on libreoffice-calc, -gnome,
> and -impress, but not libreoffice itself, so the Recommends: on
> fonts-noto-core is bypassed.  If I ask aptitude to get ready to
> install task-gnome-desktop on my testing machine (complete with
> Recommends), that pulls in a vast horde of packages (it would almost
> double the number of installed packages on that machine), but not one
> of the extra package names begins with "fon"!  Presumably that's
> another instance of upgrades keeping what's already there.

I stand corrected. My Debian testing was installed long ago and has been 
updated since then. And yes, libreoffice is not there. OTOH I have 
plasma-desktop available, so I may have mixed it up.

Anyway, currently it's hard to identify a Debian default font. 
Previously it was DejaVu, since fonts-dejavu-core was always(?) 
installed and fontconfig-config preferred DejaVu. Now fontconfig-config 
prefers Noto for sans-serif and serif, but fonts-noto-core is not always 
present. And that is the reason for the edit of the templates file which 
this thread was originally about.

>> But I think we would need a 'font expert' to help get it right.
> 
> I'm not one of those.  When people say "look at these screenshots of
> how much worse it is!" I can rarely even tell which way round
> "before" and "after" are meant to be...

Haha, it could have been me who said that. :)