Re: Font compression and supporting commercial software

[Alex Yukhimets <aqy6633@acf5.nyu.edu>]

> Alex,
> 
> The social contract says "We will support our users who develop and run
> non-free software on Debian". It does _not_ say we will _freeze_ the
> system for them.

Dear Bruce, 

could you please (well, privately) explain me what's wrong with my English? 
I would really appreciate that. 

I did _not_ propoze to freeze the system.  If the _current_ policy not to
depend on non-DFSG software (like compress), let's keep that policy.
But we promised to support users of non-free software. And what? We did
not make a single warning that upgrading to Xfree86-3.3 fonts will break
their x-servers, we did not explained how to fix it. Even if xservers
currently shiped by commercial vendors supported gziped fonts, many
users would still had older versions. 

What I was talking about is that it might be a good move to release
Xfree86-3.3 fonts compressed rather than gziped into _contrib_.
It would be natural  for X maintainer to perform that release, but he
said that it is impossible due to some technical reasons. I myself is not
capable of performing that task due to technical reasons also. What I 
can do is release a converter package that would depend on ncompress 
from non-free which will contain a script to gunzip and then compress
their X fonts.

That's it. Now, what's wrong with that?

> 
> To support them, we should warn the developers if we know a change we
> are marking will break their software, and we should tell them how to

Not doing that.

> fix it. We should also not make such changes gratuitously. In addition,
> we should support them by making our unreleased prototype system
> available for them to run, and for them to look at the source code.
> Of course, we already do this.
> 
> I would like Debian to use font compression, even if this temporarily
> breaks some commercial X servers. By switching to compressed fonts we
> do not _permanently_ break those servers - we only give the commercial
> vendors something to catch up with, and we can warn them when we do it.
> I'm sure XI Graphics (formerly X-Inside) would make their system understand
> compressed fonts if we requested it. Metroworks would probably do so as
> well. If the code has been in XFree86 for a year, they may already have
> included it in their systems. Users who want to support legacy servers can
> uncompress the fonts on their own, but if they don't have support for their
> commercial servers they might do better by running XFree86.

Yeah, but sometimes they don't have that choice.
And the only possible support from Xi Graphics or Metrolink would be
released upgrade which would definitely cost money. I understand that
I can't do much about it but do _you_ feel comfortable helping  these
companies make that extra money from your users?
I would really appreciate plain yes/no.

Thank you.

Alex Y.

> 
> 	Thanks
> 
> 	Bruce
> 
> I'm 
> -- 
> Can you get your operating system fixed when you need it?
> Linux - the supportable operating system. http://www.debian.org/support.html
> Bruce Perens K6BP   bruce@pixar.com   510-215-3502

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 |      _ 7           |            Alexander Yukhimets            |
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