Bubulle's weblog

Thanks to the longstading work by Paul Wise in nearly 3 years...and with some help from my side (and from other members of the font packaging team), we're getting closer of a longstanding goal : removing Defoma from the archive. Defoma is indeed obsoleted by fontconfig, which doesn't need these "hints" file, turning the packaging of fonts into a very simple process.

On last Saturday, Paul sent the removal request for defoma. The request mentions blocking bugs that are, for most of them, requests for font packages to drop the dependency on defoma.

As we already sent patches for these bugs, I started NMU'ing the remaining packages this week-end. Most of them were apparently nearly abandoned packages, so I had no shame doing that so quickly. Indeed, I no longer fear NMU'ing packages even for non critical issues and I even sometimes no longer fear adding a few other fixes when the packages are very obviously poorly maintained (things like source v3, debhelper compatibility bump, build-{indep|arch} targets support, etc.).

After this NMU wave, we should be left, in one week, with only five packages blocking the removal of defoma. I might even NMU some of them, though some are TeX-related packages providing T1 fonts additionnally to TrueType ones...something I'l less familiar with.

Whatever happens, I now nearly sure that wheezy will not have defoma. Yay! Hats off to Paul.