Hi. I posted a question here a few days ago about making my fonts into a debian package.
I've tried using dh_make on a tarball of my fonts, and this has produced a plethora of files, and I'm somewhat stuck on the "rules" file. I think I can figure this out, if I keep plugging away at it. I have succesfully made a .deb which I can install & uninstall. Here is how I did it: By expanding the sharefont_0.10-7.deb package with dpkg -e and dpkg -x, I got directory with the contents of sharefont_0.10-7.deb. I used this directory as a model for setting up my own directory of fonts, complete with postinst, postrm, & control files. I then ran dpkg -b on this directory, which produced a deb file which I can install and uninstall. (and yes, the fonts work fine) My question is: Is this an appropriate way to proceed (using another package as a model?)? Will I run into any terrible problems using this method? Thanks for everyone who responded to my original letter. I don't mean to be a nuisance and ask (what must seem to you) silly questions. But I have *absolutely no* experience or familiarity with this, and it seems very complicated. matt If anyone wants to see the deb I made, it is at: http://www.theory.org/~matt/strthrwr/fonts/download/matttsfonts.deb (It's in flagrant violation of the debian-policy on fonts, creating it's own directory. I'll fix that eventually.) BTW, many people have asked about the status of fonts as source/binary, and what the build process is, and how they might be released under the GPL. I'm no expert, but here's my opinion: These are PostScript fonts, and PostScript is a language (by some stretch of the imagination). So these fonts are, in effect, distributed in their source code form (much like a perl script would be). PostScript/TrueType fonts can be created by a number of programs (nothing for *nix, AFAIK), and these programs are basically drawing programs which output PostScript and TrueType code which draws each letter. So, if you can believe it, it's source that can't be edited (easily) under *nix.
