Re: SIG status?

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Le mercredi 24 mars 2010 à 21:55 -0400, Jon Stanley a écrit :
> [lots of folks BCC'ed]
> 
> This is an email being sent to all SIG's that are listed on the SIG
> page on the wiki.  I'm trying to find the individual that's the
> "leader" of the SIG in order to avoid spamming mailing lists, but
> sometimes, that's what is necessary.
> 
> I'm writing on behalf of the Fedora Engineering Service, a new group
> within Fedora that acts on items submitted by FESCo that general
> volunteers are not likely to accomplish because either they are more
> administrative in nature, or there is a general disinterest in doing
> it, generally because it's seen as "boring". The task that I am now
> engaged in falls within that category :).
> 
> As FESCo has responsibility for SIG oversight in Fedora, I'm supposed
> to figure out where each SIG stands in terms of their activities in
> Fedora. Specifically, we have a few questions that we'd like answered
> by each SIG leader:
> 
> 1) Is your SIG still active? (if no, skip the remainder of the
> questions, unless you feel that it could be active again, if only for
> not having resources, etc)

Yes it is still active though I'm the main person animating it and I've
not done a good job of it lately due to lack of time

> 2) Would your SIG be so kind as to provide monthly status reports to
> either FESCo or the 'devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' mailing list?
> Think of this not as a bureaucratic measure being imposed on you, but
> more as what I call a "force multiplier" - a way to bring to the
> forefront of the larger Fedora community what your SIG is doing and
> why they might want to get involved in it.

I've tried in the past to post such reports on the devel list but have
realized that they take too much work to be done monthly (I spent
several weeks preparing them, which is not efficient given the low
number of active contributors to the SIG).

Therefore I've written an audit script (repo-font-audit in
fontpackages-tools) that collects 80% of the info I used to collect
manually, is more thorough, and can be run at any time by anyone to
check the fonts status in Fedora.

> 3) Are there any resources that other teams in Fedora could provide
> (design work for something, marketing outreach, documentation people,
> IRC channel, mailing list - whatever you can think of, really) that
> would be beneficial to your SIG?

The art team has been kind enough to publicize the fonts they wanted
packaged. This has been invaluable (even though I think Mairin has been
disappointed in the number of fonts that got packaged quickly) and I
hope this effort will be sustained in the long run.

It would be invaluable if someone took repo-font-audit and figured how
to integrate its tests in autoQA. It won't happen before a long time
otherwise, which is a pitty.

It would be nice if someone plumbed repo-font-audit to a cron
server-side to provide the monthly reports you asked for (I'm not always
available to run it at the right date, or my rawhide system may be too
broken to run it, etc)

Many fonts already existed in Fedora as part of apps before the fonts
sig existed. Unlike fonts packaged by the SIG, they often violate all
sorts of packaging guidelines. We'd like each packager and SIG to review
its existing packages that include fonts and clean up their packaging
(TEX is a huge sore). We'd like QA to get involved in motivating those
packagers to clean up their packages. Had it involved itself when the
fonts packaging guidelines were clarified last year (as we tried to
request through a Fedora feature) we could look forward instead of
dragging those old problems still.

We do not have anyone interested in core fonts in the SIG but people
assume we're the one that need to clean up this mess. Someone is needed
to take charge of those, it's a never ending source of friction
otherwise.

We do not have enough feedback from local teams. It's awfully hard to
figure if a font is good or not for a script you're not a native user
of. The i18n team has good engineering resources but we need more local
involvement (ambassadors, l10n) to report breakage in fonts (not just
"this font is bad" but "this font is bad because of this bit in this
glyph", so it is not a 15 min feedback task)

The main font libraries (freetype, fontconfig, pango...) in Fedora are
in a pretty good shape but many apps (even art/design/office oriented
apps) do not use them properly and then users blame the libs of the
fonts. We need more people to fix font problems application-side, and we
need people to document how apps are supposed to use fonts, because it
turns out many application authors are only dimly aware of OpenType
specifics and misuse fonts because they think the reality is simpler
than it is (ascii fonts, no ligatures, only n,b,i,bi styles). A lot of
bug reporters just dump their problems on the fonts sig and assume we'll
relay wherever's appropriate — but we're too short-handed to do it and
many times the fix is outside fonts sig packages.

We need more people. Any help to recruit them is welcome :)

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

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