[tex-live] TeX Live and GNU FreeFont

Steve White stevan.white at gmail.com
Wed Apr 15 19:18:20 CEST 2015


Hi Zdenek,

The latest release version of GNU FreeFont is the 2012 version.

The files in SVN are intermediate copies, untested, and known to be
broken in various ways.

I don't know what "opt-in" means in this context.

Zdenek, out of deference to you and your work with the FreeFont
project, I would be willing to cut some problematic areas out of the
development versions, and do some degree of testing, and make a
special release for your project.  This will take some weeks.  Will
that fit your plans?

Frankly, I'm shocked that anybody would consider releasing
intermediate versions of somebody else's project without discussing it
with them first...  but evidently it happens.  Somebody has
misunderstood something -- maybe it was me.  I will shut down public
access to the SVN of GNU FreeFont as soon as I get a chance.  We must
be free to commit questionable changes, without fear that somebody
will build them and release them to the public.

Of course, it's free software.  And since they have been freely
available for download, the intermediate files are also free software.
So in principle you can release those SVN files -- but if you do so,
please change the name of the font, and handle any bug reports about
them yourself.  We do not want bug reports on half-completed, untested
work.

Cheers!




On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 4:41 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Norbert,
>
> thank you for clarification. When the information appeared on Kevin's blog
> and in the XeTeX list, it was not clear that the svn head is distributed in
> the "opt-in" TL repository. I hpe this solution is OK.
>
> Do you just package automatically the head or do you run some tests before
> doing it? I have a lot of test files for Devanagari. The tests are not
> machine radable, it is necessary to look at the PDF files. I can do it
> before you package a new svn release.
>
> Zdeněk Wagner
> http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>
> 2015-04-15 15:43 GMT+02:00 Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>:
>>
>> Hi Zdenek,
>>
>> what you describe is already happening!
>>
>> * TeX Live contains the latest released version
>>
>> * my tlptexlive contains the svn head
>>
>> The svn head was *never* part of TeX Live
>>
>> So I don't see any problem here.
>>
>> Unfortunately Steve was not very happy about this development, but maybe
>> this has changed?
>>
>> All the best
>>
>> Norbert
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> PREINING, Norbert                              http://www.preining.info
>> JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
>> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0  ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Apr 15, 2015, at 9:39 PM, Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I want to open a question of GNU FreeFont that should be clarified before
>> TL 2015 gets frozen for DVD. As we know, the latest official release is
>> quite old and its Devanagari block does not work with HarfBuzz. On the other
>> hand, the Devanagari block in the subversion repository is OK (I will test
>> it soon with TL 2015 pretest in order to be sure). This means that one of
>> the most beautiful Devanagari fonts is not officially available to normal
>> users. Some time ago TL 2014 started to distribute GNU FreeFont from the
>> head of the svn repository. This seems to be good news for users but bad
>> news for font developers. I see two possibilities:
>>
>> 1. If the font is ready for an official release, it would be good to
>> release it before TL is frozen for DVD production
>>
>> 2. If there are still too things to be resolved before release, we should
>> take advantage of the possibility of several TL repositories. The standard
>> repository should contain the officially released FreeFont while an
>> additional repository will contain FreeFont from the head of the svn repo.
>> The advantage is that those who prefer a stable font and do not need
>> Devanagari will not configure this additional TL repo. Those who need
>> Devanagari and are prepared to take the risk that the font does not work
>> will configure this additional repository.
>>
>> Is this reasonable?
>>
>> Zdeněk Wagner
>> http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
>> http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz
>
>



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