Help a little, make Fedora 10 a lot better

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Mission accomplished?
=====================

It's the half-year mark, a final package set is being spun, blocking
problems have been resolved, the sky is blue… People can now focus on
this version release parties right?

WRONG

It's time to think of the NEXT version release parties. And how to make
the next Fedora version rock so much the parties will be HUGE. In
particular, care of issues that will need a full release cycle to mature
before the next release.

We're not there (yet)
=====================

Such as… fonts. Fedora inherited from Red Hat Linux an impeccable
American server OS pedigree. Unfortunately it also inherited
its American server OS limits. Massive non-English Linux desktop
deployments often use Debian or Debian derivatives. Meanwhile we discuss
English locales support. 

Why fonts?
==========

More than flash or mp3 support we need more fonts, so the text that
makes most of our UI renders fine. It does not matter how many cool
features the Desktop team adds in the next cycle — if the UI text
screams to the user “I hate you” he won't install better fonts manually.
He'll switch to a competitor that deploys Fedora-developed features with
nice fonts.

Why fonts? (really)
===================

We need more artsy fonts so the art team can produce all kinds of cool
promotional Fedora material (including release party flyers).

We need more international fonts so regions where the Fedora presence is
currently nil can join the partying.

We need more fonts so the work of all the non-server SIGs is properly
appreciated.

Over all, we need more fonts so users can customize their desktop to the
point they can't envision using something else than Fedora.

Why me?
=======

The situation got a little better during the Fedora 9 cycle. But we're
still badly lagging distributions that have been investing in good font
experience for a long time (Debian, Mandriva). And the Fedora 9 effort
was produced by few people, that can not scale indefinitely.

The Fedora font wishlist has 32 entries today. Not counting the public
font lists it references: only fonts someone explicitly requested.
That's more than 2/3 of the total of our currently packaged fonts.

The list is growing, not shrinking. Many entries have half a year
(before we didn't tack them).

Clearly a targeted effort by new packagers is required to fix the
situation by Fedora 10 time.

It's easy!
==========

Font packaging is not hard:
1. we've got good official streamlined packaging guidelines
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Packaging 
2. most font upstreams make few releases; you don't have to track them
closely

A font package is perfect for would-be packagers that need to to learn
the ropes on a simple package. A font package is perfect for experienced
packagers that do not have the time to take care of another time-waster.

Let's party!
============

So here's the deal:

A. We need 32 packagers to adopt a font in the SIG wishlist:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Fonts/Triaging/Pipeline#wishes
(Including fonts best packaged locally. It's a chicken-and-egg problem:
we won't get local packagers before Fedora is attractive enough for them
to join)

B. We need them to package their font by Fedora 10 alpha¹

C. *Then* we can have huge Fedora 10 parties

D. For Fedora 11, repeat with “getting better than the competition” as
objective



¹ So the result can be tested and the eventual buglets resolved
upstream and in fontconfig before the final release

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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