> besides the fact that I agree with the people saying that this team is a > unnecessary institution for *package maintenance*, and that ttf-opensymbol > is built from the openoffice.org source package anyway ...
I think I need to try making the point clearer as many people seem to hve concerns (or could misunderstand) what is the intent here. Sure, I believe that a team can bring more to package maintenance than some of you seem to believe. Of course, for package such as yours, René, where the maintenance is obviously active and efficient, for sure the team won't bring you much and simply ignoring the team (or lurking on its mailing list as I just wrote in answer to Aurélien message) will certainly be OK. However, what I feel is that several font packages are mostly "one shot" packages, ie packages built once because a new free font popped up, and no more actively maintained. This may even become more and more true while we are extending our language coverage (wearing my i18n hat, here) and see the need for new fonts supporting new ranges of Unicode. Here, the team can bring a basic framework for people who want to bring new fonts in Debian...or even provide the maintenance for people who *need* a new font in Debian but feel they don't have the skills for a Debian package maintenance. I have live example in my mind such as the "ttf-lao" font I just uploaded and the "ttf-dzongkha" font I will soon upload. The team can also act as a gateway between some upstream maintainers of "general" fonts which intend to cover as many parts of Unicode as possible (here, I think about ttf-dejavu and ttf-freefont mostly)....so that they can *integrate* the work done on some more specialized fonts (for instance, the fonts I mentioend above). > Christian Perrier wrote: > > Improve communication > > --------------------- > > This team will, by the use of a mailing list, allow good communication > > among font package maintainers. This can help all of us to benefit > > >from the experience of font experts, who are not that common. > > ... this ... > > > Write a font packaging policy > > ----------------------------- > > One of the goals for this team would be setting up a font packaging > > policy. Font packages are usually very simple packages, but having a > > common packaging style would greatly help incorporating new fonts in > > Debian. > > ... and this ... > > makes sense. > > > Enforcing this policy to existing font packages is not in the top > > priority of the team. > > What is a policy useful for when most packages are not following it? I > think if there's a sane policy people should have to migrate to it; > otherwise you don't need to write a policy for that... The spirit in this proposal is essentially: do not break existing package practices when they have been proven working. This is what I want to say above: if we succeed in writing a font packaging policy, then there will be a long period of time where this policy will remain as a recommendation. Maybe, some day, after it has been proven that a consensus is reached among font package maintainers, it will become an enforceable sub-policy. But, here, the team will need to work with the maintainers who did choose to stay outside the team, for various (and most often good) reasons.
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