Suffix for "Old Standard" ?

[pablo.martin-gomez]

Hi,

As I'm attempting to create a package of the (great) Old Standard font,
I have mail the founder and have got the answer (forwarded). The answer
is quite harsh (if that I spare you the "anti-source building"
paragraph.

So we need to add a suffix to the name but I'm not imaginative for
finding a good suffix (maybe "iced" as Nicolas propose), anyone of you
have an lightning idea ?

Pablo

----- Message Transféré -----

Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:08:35 +0400
De: Alexey Kryukov <anagnost(a)yandex.ru&gt;
À: Martin-Gomez Pablo <pablo.martin-gomez(a)laposte.net&gt;
Sujet: Re: Packaging "Old Standard" font in Fedora



On Wednesday 23 July 2008, you wrote:

>  about building Old Standard from source. Do you still wish us to
>  change the name of the font if we built it (without any
>  modifications) from sources ?  It would be quite daft to have Old
>  Standard packaged in Fedora without it original name. 
Unfortunately, yes. I don't insist the name should be changed entirely,
adding a suffix (say, "Old Standard FC") would be sufficient and even
preferrable. 

The reason is that I could not update the source package on my site for
more than a year (instead I was spending my efforts improving FontForge
itself :), and the current FF version is not guaranteed to produce
correct results with such old source files. This can lead to problems
I have no intention to be responsible of.

[...]

-- 
Regards,
Alexej Kryukov <anagnost at yandex dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty

[Dave Crossland]

2008/7/23 Martin-Gomez Pablo <pablo.martin-gomez(a)laposte.net&gt;:
>  So we need to add a suffix to the name but I'm not imaginative for
>  finding a good suffix (maybe "iced" as Nicolas propose), anyone of you
>  have an lightning idea ? 
Why not use a build of FF from the same time the source files were published?

-- 
Regards,
Dave

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 24 juillet 2008 01:11, Dave Crossland a écrit :
>  2008/7/23 Martin-Gomez Pablo <pablo.martin-gomez(a)laposte.net&gt;:
> >
> > So we need to add a suffix to the name but I'm not imaginative for
> > finding a good suffix (maybe "iced" as Nicolas propose), anyone of
> > you have an lightning idea ?
>
>  Why not use a build of FF from the same time the source files were
>  published? 
1. Other fonts in the distro depend on a recent fontforge release. If
we start requiring one fontforge version per font we're dead.

2. While the author objects most to the current fontforge version, I'm
almost sure he'd want us to change the font name even if we used the
exact same version as his.

As the author says, we have to stand up for our own choices. Fedora
builds its content from sources. With fonts and pretty much anything
else that means aligning on a few build tool versions which are almost
certain not to be the same upstreams tested, and if this change
introduces problems, we have to track and get them fixed.

(but at least we know we can re-generate and patch our version at
will, unlike organisations that copy a pre-built version and have no
idea how to fix it in case of problems)

The author's feeling is not uncommon software-side too, you know.

I think we'll try to bump the fontforge version in fedora-devel to the
latest available upstream just before F10 beta. And then rebuild every
font depending on it. This way Fedora 10 users will have a recent
fontforge in-distro and we'll be sure all our fonts work with it.
That's what we did in previous releases.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot