Hello Antoine, On Mon, 2 Mar 2020 at 20:13, Antoine Beaupré <anar...@debian.org> wrote: > I tried the package available here: > > https://salsa.debian.org/debian/polybar > > It works well! One unfortunate problem I have found, however, is that it > requires the siji font to work in its default configuration. That font > is not available in Debian right now (#894413) but worse, even if it > would be, it's a bitmap font which requires enabling those across the > board (`rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf`) which, in turns, means > that bitmap fonts *will* be used everywhere.
I briefly discussed with upstream about having a default config for polybar in here: https://github.com/polybar/polybar/issues/2016#issuecomment-589976084 And the summary is that there is no such thing as a default configuration right now, we are shipping an example config file that is not supposed to be used by people as it contains specifics from the machine used to build the package, this also means that the package is non-reproducible at this point. Upstream seems to be interested in having an option to autogenerate a config file at runtime if none is found, the user is currently supposed to either have the file or generate it using upstream: https://github.com/polybar/polybar#configuration You do raise a valid point, I agree that we should make the example config as working out-of-the-box as possible, There are multiple ways we can approach this issue: A) Patch the example file with some font that comes on Debian per default, this will not solve the reprobuild issue and the file will probably still be broken for some users, but at least is closer to a working one. B) Provide a config generator and mention it in the docs, can be upstream's one, assuming that it will not require the user to install the build-deps. Solves the reprobuild issue as we can ship a hardcoded non-working example. C) Provide a hardcoded generic example, it will have to omit some functionality but at least they can be commented out so the user might fill in with their specs. D) Wait for upstream to add a feature to auto generate the config when none is found. A new issue has to be created to track this, as the other one was more about the config location. It will also take an unknown amount of time until someone works on that. I believe either B,C or D would properly solve the issue but I don't mind doing A meanwhile. In case you would like to have A, could you suggest a font that comes preinstalled that worked for you? I'm afraid we're gonna have to rely on some extra font and add it to the package's Recommends because the font has to have the needed symbols. I appreciate input/help towards any of those solutions. > Also note that I previously mentioned the problems with that font in > this bug report... I have missed that, thanks for the heads up. Regards, -- Samuel Henrique <samueloph>
