Should we delete fontforge ?

[ken@…]

ISTR that in the distant past we needed fontforge for a kde-related font, and later I used fontforge in my 'font analysis' (show the glyphs in a font) as the only practical way to extract a ttf file from a ttc collection. That was years ago, I've only just come back to doing font analysis and I've now found that the ttc format has become uncommon for freely-available screen fonts.

Looking for the current versions of fonts I previously looked at which were in a ttc (NotoSansCJK and the Mono equivalent) they are either in language-specific ttfs, or (for Mono) no-longer maintained, but with some ttf files available elsewhere.

At the moment I have the original zip file for NotoSansCJK-Regular.ttc, and I can extract one of the language variants to a ttf. But for the current versions I do not need to do that.

The background to ttc files is covered at ​https://fontsaga.com/ttc-file-extension/?expand_article=1 and there are apparently now perl modules to extract a ttf from a ttc ​https://metacpan.org/pod/Font::TTF::Ttc and Python tools ​https://fonttools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I'll be tagging fontforge when I've checked a few other things, but it seems to be such a niche product that I find it hard to believe any BLFS users actually use it.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Seems reasonable to me. After the 12.0 release we should probably take a hard look at blfs and see what other packages we can remove.

[pierre]

What's the point in removing it?

1. The maintainer (Ken) is inclined to removing it
2. Nobody has spoken up telling they were using it
3. It would allow to get reed of libspiro, too, although it is an optional dependency of gegl for drawing curves using "clothoid splines"

What's the point in keeping it?

1. Apart from tagging every six months, it does not add much overhead to our workflow. The last release is from January this year, and the previous one from March 2022
2. Some users (well, at least one) think it is nice to have a font editor in the book

In view of this, I think point 1 for removing is the most important, and so fontforge and libspiro should be archived.

[Xi Ruoyao]

If nobody will to take the maintainership we should just archive them.

[Bruce Dubbs]

I lean toward keeping it. Typically an update does not cause a lot of problems, but if the next update does cause a problem like FTBFS, then archive it.

[Douglas R. Reno]

I agree, and it does provide some nice utility if you are editing (or viewing, in some cases) font files

[Xi Ruoyao]

Based on comment 4 and 5 marking this wontfix.