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35a32c5
(Get the code!)
I really think we should work together with the Debian maintainers on this one to find a solution suitable for all of us. I've therefore taken the liberty to assign this to one of them, Martin Quinson, for his input. You probably know more on the Debian-side of this issue than me.
In the meantime, some rough comments on my part:
From Debian's point of view, if a thousand packages all use the same fonts, there's no point in installing and storing new duplicates of the same font for each package. Therefore the fonts are split out and installed once in a single package which all the other packages can depend on. This takes less disk space, band width etc. and makes it easier to keep the operating system consistent.
The main reason we see a difference is because we use an older version of the fonts, while the common font used for the packages is newer. (See btw #10 and #11)
>Our PPA should be as close to our upstream as possible.
Well, there's really two upstreams here; we maintain the Widelands code, and Debian maintains the packaging. In order to build the daily builds in our PPA, we take the Debian packaging and do a couple of tweaks, mainly adjusting the list of dependencies to match what is actually needed in current trunk. My goal is that we can keep our packaging up to date by syncing newer versions from Debian, and provide a good basis for the changes needed when packaging the next stable release because we will already have done much of the work to keep trunk packages working. (Basically get a loop going where changes are pulled in both directions, and we benefit from each others work)
For that to work optimally, I'd prefer to keep our changes of the packaging to a minimum. This reduces the delta of changes, making it easier to merge in the latest packaging changes from Debian. (It also makes it easier for the maintainers to pull in our changes withouth having to filter out too much when preparing the package of a new stable release)
So it is rather easy to use the fonts from the Widelands repo instead, but I don't want to diverge too much from the Debian packaging if we can avoid it. Both to make it easier to keep the loop mentioned above going, but also because the vast majority of users on Debian/Ubuntu/Linux Mint and any derivatives of will use the packages available in the official repo. It's easy to say "oh, that's up for the maintainers to fix", but really it affects the Widelands our users will get, so it is in our interest to work together on this issue.
I'm also curious how the new fonts will enter into this discussion, and whether they exist in Debian or not at this point. (Btw, we already have a mix of fonts in our (the Widelands font) and other packages (every other I believe) today, so it's not all that crazy :) )