Questions about font packaging, hinting and non-responsive maintainer process

[Alexander Ploumistos]

Hello,

A few days ago I was fooling around with Unicode stuff and I noticed
that the Symbola font had been updated upstream, but not in Fedora, so
I decided to have a go at repackaging it and submitting the spec file
to the maintainer. Turns out it was more "fun" than I thought it would
be.

1. There are now 2 fonts, the usual Symbola.ttf plus another one,
Symbola_hint.ttf, which includes hinting instructions. I had a really
hard time trying to find differences between the two, and my
understanding is that at least GNOME handles font hinting on a number
of levels, so at least GNOME would not benefit from the inclusion of
the second font. Is that also the case for the other DEs? If we are to
ship both fonts, should we include AppData and fontconfig files for
both of them? What would the content of each file be, given that the
font name would be common (ttname reports the same metadata for both)?

2. The original spec file makes use of the %_font_pkg macro, which is
not that well documented. I came across a number of old mailing list
posts (here and in SuSE) that advised against using it. I checked the
spec files for other fonts, some were using it, others were not. What
is considered best practice here?

3. What was packaged as documentation (Symbola.pdf) is actually a
sample and is now taken out of the source zip, but it is still hosted
on the creator's website. There is a documentation file in MS Word XML
format. Is it acceptable to run it through a filter during prep to
turn it into a LibreOffice or PDF file? There is also an html file
with sample text, supposedly to help the user decide on which of the
two fonts to use (with hinting or whithout). Again, I could not tell
them apart. Should that file be included as well?

(In case I wasn't clear, the upstream source package contains 4 files:
Symbola.ttf, Symbola_hint.ttf, Symbola.docx and Symbola.htm)

When I submitted the spec file in bugzilla (#1197402), another user
pointed out that the maintainer, Robin Sonefors, aka ozamosi
<ozamosi at flukkost.nu> has not responded to previous requests for an
update (bug #1131000). fedora-active-user reports:

Last login in FAS:
   ozamosi 2013-08-15
Last action on koji:
   Mon, 03 Nov 2014 package list entry revoked: gdouros-symbola-fonts
in f21-Beta by ausil
Last package update on bodhi:
   No activity found on bodhi
Last actions performed according to fedmsg:
  - ozamosi updated their irc filters on 2015-02-12 22:34:58
  - ozamosi updated their irc filters on 2015-02-12 22:34:56
  - ozamosi updated their irc filters on 2015-02-12 22:34:54
  - ozamosi updated their email filters on 2015-02-12 22:34:54
  - ozamosi updated their email filters on 2015-02-12 22:34:52
  - ozamosi updated their email filters on 2015-02-12 22:34:50

Given that bug 1131000 is over seven months old, should we proceed
with the non-responsive maintainer process starting with the request
for contact info, or should we file a new bug and escalate from there?