Subject: Re: [PATCH] gnu: fontconfig: Add replacement with font-dejavu instead of gs-fonts.
From: Marius Bakke <[email-masked]>
To: Leo Famulari <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:39 +0200
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Leo Famulari <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Sun, May 17, 2020 at 04:50:12PM +0200, Marius Bakke wrote:
>> This is a hack to make (some) fonts working when users don't have fonts
>> specified in their system configuration, and (crucially) places where
>> the fontconfig cache may be unavailable such as 'guix pack's.
>> 
>> I'm not sure whether font-dejavu is a good replacement here.  Another
>> approach could be to convert gs-fonts to TrueType or OpenType format.
>> 
>> Thoughts?  I don't know much about fonts and would appreciate feedback.
>
> I think you should push right away, assuming that it helps and doesn't
> rebuild the world.

I pushed the patch as ab9de8cfb0525ef43668712ac898707f97f9a620.

I verified that it fixes the immediate problem with fonts in the Guix
manual (#41282) as well as 'guix pack' (#41344).  It should also provide
a decent fallback for cases where the user did not explicitly install
any fonts such as in #41241.

Hoping for angry reports now about why such a poor replacement font was
chosen.  ;-)