[Fedora TeX Live] Current license review status?

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Sat Sep 1 18:02:46 CEST 2012


On Sat, Sep 1, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Bob Tennent wrote:
>  >|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".

Yes, Type1 fonts are definitely legacy. Everywhere else. But not for
the TeX world.

LuaTeX is not even at version 1 yet and it hasn't taken off in LaTeX
community yet (support in packages is critically missing), XeTeX lost
main developer and has been stagnating for years now, without even
finishing implementation of OpenType Math properly and without support
for 64-bit on Mac OS X (it cannot be compiled as 64-bit application).
(Khaled is now in charge, but not nearly as active as the original
author.)

And everything else will be broken.

You could try to delete <texmf>/fonts/type1 (ideally also
<texmf>/fonts/afm, <texmf>/fonts/enc, <texmf>/fonts/map,
<texmf>/fonts/vf), run mktexlsr and see if you can still get anything
TeX-related to work.

I'm not trying to vouch for the old technology. I would love to see it
gone. But for TeX the time has not come yet to let the old technology
go. The new technology is not even nearly ready to take over,
particularly not OpenType Math.

>  >|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?

Here:

... 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.

But it's not excluded that I misunderstood the meaning. Just to make
sure: in TeX live there are two font files:
    <texmf</fonts/opentype/public/lm/lmroman12-regular.otf
    <texmf>/fonts/type1/public/lm/lmr12.pfb
with exactly the same font, except that one is OpenType and the other
one is Type1. From what I understand these two fonts have to belong to
two different (sub)packages, but do the rules of Fedora allow those
two files to be installed at the same time on someone's machine?

> If this
> causes difficulties for fontconfig, it's not our problem.

TeX fonts shouldn't confuse fontconfig unless fontconfig is configured
to look for fonts in texmf tree.

Mojca


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