[Fedora TeX Live] Current license review status?

[Bob Tennent]

 >|On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 12:31 PM, Jindrich Novy wrote:
 >|>
 >|> The only blocker which makes it hard to let TeX Live 2012 be easily
 >|> introduced in Fedora is the Font Packaging Policy [1]. The problem
 >|is that
 >|> the current implementation of font packaging macros enforces to have
 >|> all TTF, TTC, PFA, PFB, PCF, OTF files in the same font family to be a
 >|> separate subpackage of the main RPM shipping fonts. The problem is
 >|> that the design of the macros allows only one subpackage per spec.
 >|
 >|First of all, the TeX fonts should not be seen by fontconfigure since
 >|they are normally isolated in a TeX tree. I would believe that the
 >|Font Packaging Policy has to hold for fonts installed into system
 >|folders where other GUI programs can access them. There it actually is
 >|a problem if two fonts with the same name are installed. In TeX trees
 >|that usually shouldn't be a problem and I don't see any good reason to
 >|enforce that policy on TeX packages.

I've had this discussion (and others) with Nicholas. I can vouch for his
inflexibility.  According to him, type 1 fonts are "legacy".

 >|On the other hand, if you really cannot avoid the policy, you would
 >|end up with a pretty broken TeX installation. To start with, one could
 >|probably say goodbye to ConTeXt where MKII uses PFB fonts and MKIV
 >|uses OTF fonts of exactly the same font families plus math fonts from
 >|PFB (Latin Modern by default). This means that you would probably need
 >|four packages for a single font family, and one would have to do the
 >|split manually, there's almost no way to do the split automatically.
 >|And even then one could only have one out of three engines working
 >|properly at the same time.

I think you've misunderstood something. Where does it say that different
formats of the same font family can't be packaged together? If this
causes difficulties for fontconfig, it's not our problem.

Bob T.