BDF font files have not been allowed in Debian packages for a while, as per Debian policy. I emailed Russ Allbery last year about the possibility of allowing BDF fonts back into Debian for reasons that follow. He was willing to entertain the idea. I waited for the lenny release before bringing up this possible change in policy.
Currently BDF fonts are supposed to be converted to PCF. BDF is a plain ASCII format, and PCF is binary. Thus a PCF font file will be more compact than its BDF source. However, the original BDF version can contain ASCII comments that are not preserved in the PCF version. These comments often contain information such as author, copyright, and licensing information. With the BDF versions discarded, that information is lost -- there is no round-trip conversion from BDF to PCF to BDF. Thus a blind BDF-to-PCF conversion can discard valuable information the author intended to remain with the font. This can be significant given the abundance of BDF fonts in the early history of X11. In addition, PCF format fonts are gzipped on Debian systems as per Debian Policy. If BDF fonts are also gzipped, there is little difference in size between the two formats so the advantage of the binary PCF format over the ASCII BDF format disappears. In fact I created a unifont.bdf.gz file for testing and it was a little smaller than the derivative unifont.pcf.gz file. A unifont.bdf file worked fine on Debian, and so did the derived unifont.pcf.gz file, but unfortunately a unifont.bdf.gz file did not. Is there a possibility of getting .bdf.gz font files to work in Debian, then allowing .bdf.gz files in Debian font packages, and updating Debian Policy to allow installation of BDF fonts compressed with 'gzip -9'? Paul Hardy GPG Key ID: E6E6E390 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
