On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 16:59 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
Le Mar 24 novembre 2009 16:00, Chris Adams a écrit :
> What is the real maintenance cost?
>
> You have said that core fonts are not going away, so the maintenance
> cost will not go away.
The costs could go down to nothing if there was no core font user left in Fedora
.. continuing the reasoning: if there were no packages in Fedora, the
maintenance costs would vanish.
However, there is still a justification for legacy software. Even if
some utility only supported the ASCII code set, it would be stupid to
bar its inclusion just because it doesn't support UTF-8, as it probably
was not designed to serve that purpose.
> If you don't want to maintain something, then the normal way
is to
> orphan it and let someone else take the job, not badger everybody else
> using the thing you don't want to maintain anymore.
Does not work that way. If it was a clear package dependency, I could orphan
the stuff, and all the people who complain at me now would be forced to take
themselves in charge and do the work needed by the stuff they use. Because of
the brain-damaged way core fonts were specified, the dependency is not
expressed in that way and I can not stop caring about core fonts without
stopping caring about other fonts (because as long as I have a fonts hat, and
no one has a core fonts one, people come to me by default and don't want to
hear about differences in font systems).
Don't fix what ain't broken. There are always st00p1d users asking silly
questions on the internet.
Instead of ranting about legacy fonts that have been used for decades,
you can direct your energy towards something useful: making sure that
new fonts that are compatible with modern font handling systems are
correctly packaged.
--
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola(a)fedoraproject.org