Comment 65 for bug 1607535

Robin, comment 63:

> This package comes originally from Debian, where the current
> version is 3.6. That version seems to work without problem,
> no matter how ugly it may be in doing so.

As a matter of fact, even Debian's version 3.4 works. It works because it uses wget to download the fonts, while Ubuntu's version of the package uses apt-helper, which has a bug, see comments 50 52 by Adrien Beau, and the bug 1655431 he links to, which points to the root cause in bug 1651923.

So it's not a case of "version 3.4 is broken, version 3.6 fixes the problem" but a case of "Ubuntu versions of the package are broken, Debian versions of the package work".

I do not know why the Ubuntu package was modified in the first place, rather than simply copied from Debian (and I personally wish there were less delta between the two distributions, to avoid these Ubuntu-only bugs). Perhaps we can find out the reasons in the changelog for the Ubuntu package.

> An update to the existing 3.6 code would
> provide a clean solution

Yes and no. On the one hand, using Debian's 3.6 package as-is certainly works, as mentionned in this thread.

But the Ubuntu package cannot be updated to pure Debian 3.6 without losing the Ubuntu-specific changes. So the changes made in Debian between 3.4 and 3.6 should instead be merged to the Ubuntu package, for it to benefit from both the features of the new version and the Ubuntu-specific changes.

Since one of these Ubuntu-specific changes is using apt-helper instead of wget, the bug would remain.

> problem which, as you will have noticed,
> affects a very large number of people

It affects me too.

> Unless someone is going actively to develop and test an updated
> package which resolves the problems with version 3.4

Someone is: Julian Klode, see bug 1651923, of which this bug is a duplicate (although I am going to temporarily remove duplicate status, see this bug, comments 56 57).

Julian has already released a fix, available in Ubuntu's upcoming 17.04 release, as is the correct procedure. Fixes aren't released directly to production releases, they are first tested in the development release, in case they don't work or cause new bugs.

If you can use the development release, please test this package and report in bug 1651923. Feedback will be appreciated and will help the fix to be backported to the production releases.

> (As a point of information, this bug also appears with 14.04.)

Crap. I was quite sure it was specific to 16.06 and 16.10. Can you give more details? In bug 1651923, bottom of comment 24, Julian Klode mentions that there is a different issue with the downloads on Trusty (14.04). Can you confirm whether you are running into this different issue (download hangs) or the issue discussed in this bug (download fails)?