Package: debian-policy Version: 4.4.1.1 Severity: normal Dear Maintainer,
Policy section 11.8.5, point 1 says > If one or more of the fonts so packaged are necessary for proper > operation of the package with which they are associated the font > package may be Recommended; if the fonts merely provide an > enhancement, a Suggests relationship may be used. Packages must not > Depend on font packages. The associated footnote explains that > This is because the X server may retrieve fonts from the local file > system or over the network from an X font server; the Debian package > system is empowered to deal only with the local file system. While this is still technically true, it seems rather irrelevant nowadays: most GUI programs directly render fonts obtained locally, and even for “traditional” X fonts, the vast majority of systems will obtain the fonts locally. Debian hasn’t had xfs for 5.5 years (<https://bugs.debian.org/bug=733958>); there is another font server available, xfstt, but that only handles TrueType fonts. It’s common for packages to strongly depend on non-X fonts they need; see for example the reverse dependencies of fonts-dejavu. While lintian objects to X font depencencies (<https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-depends-on-an-x-font-package.html>), it doesn’t have anything to say about non-X fonts (rightly so). Wouldn’t it make sense to relax the constraints on X font dependencies? Regards, Stephen -- System Information: Debian Release: 10.1 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'stable'), (100, 'unstable-debug'), (100, 'testing-debug'), (100, 'unstable'), (100, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-6-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) debian-policy depends on no packages. Versions of packages debian-policy recommends: ii libjs-sphinxdoc 1.8.4-1 Versions of packages debian-policy suggests: ii doc-base 0.10.8 -- no debconf information
