Re: Splitting off Feta

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Ferenc Wagner writes:

>>> 4. Can you think of any related issues?
>>
>> Yes: it will cause dependency problems and spurious
>> bugreports. I think it's a bad idea.
>
> You don't think too high about apt-get, do you?  Or about
> the packager? :)

Your idea is not new, we have thought about this before, because it is
the right thing to do.  I think Han-Wen is trying to be more harsh
than you deserve to live up to the interview :-)

There are two objections, the biggest one is that we often tweak the
font.  The spurious bug reports would maybe not come from Debian
users, but alas, we do have to worry about lesser distributions and
people that compile from CVS or source tarballs.

Currently, the dependency between lilypond and the font is automagic.
If (when) we split the font, we (the developers) will have to start
worrying about versioning.  We have had numerous `impossible' problem
reports in the past, even with an `integrated' font.  We do not want
to go that way again.

One easy way to avoid versioning and communication problems before
releases would be to always release a new font package with each new
lilypond version, but that would not help you.  Packagers are free to
split the lilypond package as it is now:

> Even then, it may be useful to split out the arch-indep stuff into a
> separate package to make Debian happy, but you don't have to care
> about that at all.

This is what I would suggest.

Jan.

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org