What would be considered a fault in font encodings?

[Paul Flo Williams]

I'm new here, so a paragraph of introduction first. I've just dug some
fonts I created over a decade ago off some old disks and I thought I'd
find out how to publish them and use them in Fedora, which led me to the
Fonts SIG pages, and this list. So far, I've updated the first font using
FontForge, and I'm now looking at publishing it on openfontlibrary.org
before trying to package it. I've been reading the Fonts SIG pages, taking
notes on common packaging errors by reading the package reviews, and
examining existing fonts, which leads me to my first problem.

I've downloaded a load of Fedora 11 font packages and I've been examining
them in Fontmatrix, being nosy about licence and description metadata, and
I found that BrettFont's name doesn't display properly in Fontmatrix; the
"BrettFont Regular" shows up with the notdef square where the space should
be. I was wondering whether this was a fault in the font or Fontmatrix, so
I pulled brettfont.ttf into FontForge, and it spat these errors:

The glyph named space is mapped to U+00A0.
  But its name indicates it should be mapped to U+0020.
The glyph named hyphen is mapped to U+00AD.
  But its name indicates it should be mapped to U+002D.
The glyph named semicolon is mapped to U+037E.
  But its name indicates it should be mapped to U+003B.
The glyph named Delta is mapped to U+2206.
  But its name indicates it should be mapped to U+0394.

I've used ttx from fonttools to dump the font and sure enough, space is
only mapped to 0x20 in the Macintosh Roman (1,0) cmap -- in both the
Unicode (0,3) and Microsoft Unicode (3,1) cmaps, space only maps to 0xa0,
no break space.

Because I'm new to TrueType and fontconfig, I assume that BrettFont
appears to work in Inkscape because of glyph substitution.

As an aside, ttx won't dump BrettFont correctly, even with Agira Tagoh's
patch from BZ 512504, because there's another problem with the "gasp"
table.

I guess I've got two fault reports to raise already, but I wanted to check
whether I'd done anything stupid in all the above, and I wondered whether
loading a font into FontForge and raising errors upstream would be part of
the normal workflow of a font packager? Are there any reports from
FontForge that are thought to be too pedantic to bother with?

Sorry, lots of questions in one post!

Paul.