preparing the upgrade of www-master to trixie: concerns regarding kcc (Japanese) and release notes

Hello all

CC'ing debian-japanese and debian-doc. Please include debian-www in your 
replies so the whole conversation can be referenced pointing to this 
message in the future. Thanks!

I have prepared a clean trixie machine with the minimum required 
packages and tried a local build of the website, to see if there is any 
issue to be taken into account prior to upgrade www-master (the machine 
that builds the Debian website) from bookworm to trixie.

Here are my notes:

1.- From the list of packages 
(https://salsa.debian.org/dsa-team/mirror/debian.org/blob/master/debian/control#L265 
):

- kcc (Kanji code filter) is not present in trixie so it cannot be 
installed. Not sure what happens in an upgrade, if the bookworm version 
is kept or is removed.

kcc is present in the list of packages needed in www-master since at 
least 2009, and it's installed currently in wolkenstein.debian.org, but 
not sure if it's actually used.

In my local build test (trixie machine without kcc) I didn't notice 
errors and Japanese pages look ok, but I don't know Japanese nor I know 
the specific reason for what kcc was installed many years ago.

I guess that for the upgrade (bookworm->trixie) we can ask DSA to 
uninstall kcc prior to upgrade, and tell debian-japanese to have a look 
at the results once www-master is in trixie and some website builds have 
been done. If anybody knows a better way to proceed, please tell!

2.- Bookworm release notes

* warnings:
"po4a-translate is deprecated. The unified po4a (1) program is more 
convenient and less error prone. Once configured, po4a --no-update can 
be used as a drop-in replacement to po4a-translate."

* errors:
xelatex failed
stdin.tex:24: Package fontspec Error:
stdin.tex:24: leading text: ...I.ttf , BoldItalicFont = CharisSIL-BI.ttf]
[...]
stdin.tex:24: leading text: ...I.ttf , BoldItalicFont = CharisSIL-BI.ttf]
stdin.tex:24: Font TU/CharisSIL-R.ttf(0)/m/n/10=[CharisSIL-R.ttf]/OT at 
10.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file or installed font not found.

Note: this kind of error (with several CharisSIL variants) persist even 
installing package texlive-fonts-extra  (which installs fonts-sil-charis 
and texlive-fonts-extra-links as dependencies).

We had similar errors when migrating from bullseye to bookworm, see 
thread starting with message 
https://lists.debian.org/debian-www/2024/09/msg00007.html - re-reading 
the thread, this was workarounded disabling build for bullseye, but I am 
not sure how this "disabling" was done, because as I see in 
https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/cron/-/blob/master/parts/7release-notes?ref_type=heads 
the BUILD_RELEASES variable still includes bullseye. Maybe the build was 
not triggered in www-master because there were no changes in bullseye 
release notes.

In any case I have done a local test build removing bullseye and the 
errors are present in the bookworm release too. Maybe in www-master this 
error won't happen because no changes have been done to the bookworm 
release-notes since the last successful build, but I'm not sure that 
disabling bookworm is the best solution at this time of the life cycle.

Note: I *guess* these errors would be gone if we had texlive-charissil 
in Debian, but it's not :/ and I don't know if anybody can decide better 
set of fonts to be used instead of Charis SIL and if it's reasonable to 
do that change for bookworm at this time of the life cycle.

2.- Trixie release notes
cs build to pdf fails, it should be added to NOPDF variable until it's 
fixed (I didn't look at the details). I didn't commit that change to 
release-notes because maybe some friend from the Release or 
Documentation team can try a build and help us to fix the issues before 
www-master is upgraded or shortly afterwards.

Apart from that, everything looks good to me.

Kind regards