widelands

Bug #973714
Comment #29

Comment 29 for bug 973714

Revision history for this message

Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd) wrote on 2014-11-30:

#29

Martin: Thanks for stopping by and answering our questions. Much appreciated. :)

>> Is it possible that dejavu got updated upstream without being updated in your tree?

>Entirely possible. I much rather use an outdated font though than having the look and feel changed by something external.

Fairly sure this happened. I don't remember the last time anyone actively updated the fonts until Gun's branch mentioned above.

>Though I understand now that debian never does that - if we are using outdated fonts we will not get forced to use the new ones. I am confused though why the debian package then ships different fonts than the ones we use.

Well... Technically it ships without these fonts but with a dependency to the font packages which provides them. Which was mentioned in #23, it was believed that since the name was the same, they were the exact same fonts which already existed in the other packages.
Presumably the Widelands-bundled fonts were stuck at a particular version while the Debian package pointed to whichever latest packaged version of the font, which led to noticable differences over time. Still DejaVu in both places, but different versions.

>- Keep taps on the debian font packages in the future so that we ship our own fonts as soon as the linked fonts are updated - so that the game does not change it's look and feel through a change in another font package. (...) can that be automated?

Semi-automated at least. If you look at https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/fonts-dejavu, that's the dejavu font package in Debian. Other font packages will have similar pages. Under news it has a list of the recently packaged versions (you can see they included 1.34 earlier this year). The megaphone in the news headline will give you an RSS-feed to keep track of any changes which happen to the package. Presumably (knowing Debian), there is also a mailing list where we can get notifications on this.

So packaging-wise (once Gun's branch has been merged):
A) I believe the packages in our PPA should use the Widelands-bundled fonts, and stop linking to external fonts.
B) Throughout the development cycle we keep an eye on newer versions of the fonts we use and include them in the Widelands repo as they appear. (Our PPA continous to use whatever happens to be the latest fonts we have in the Widelands repo)
C) Once we get an official release and it is time to package it in Debian, we use the linkbot to check for duplicates. Any font we have in Widelands which is also packaged in Debian, is replaced with a link/dependency. In the case where Widelands has an older/newer version of a font than Debian, we use the one provided in Widelands. (Debian packages may replace some fonts, but only the ones where Debian already has the exact same one)
D) After a new Widelands version has been packaged in Debian, we merge the packaging to our PPA. The PPA continues to use the fonts from the Widelands-repo, and we are effectively in state A/B again.

Martin: Thanks for stopping by and answering our questions. Much appreciated. :)

>> Is it possible that dejavu got updated upstream without being updated in your tree?

>Entirely possible. I much rather use an outdated font though than having the look and feel changed by something external.

Fairly sure this happened. I don't remember the last time anyone actively updated the fonts until Gun's branch mentioned above.

Well... Technically it ships without these fonts but with a dependency to the font packages which provides them. Which was mentioned in #23, it was believed that since the name was the same, they were the exact same fonts which already existed in the other packages. 
Presumably the Widelands-bundled fonts were stuck at a particular version while the Debian package pointed to whichever latest packaged version of the font, which led to noticable differences over time. Still DejaVu in both places, but different versions.