I'll just copy some points I've already made on the marketing list where
Liberation was announced:
The package needs work first:
- the spec does not follow our current rules (forces a fontconfig dep)
- it lacks any form of fontconfig setup, which is required if you want
the ms core font substitution to actually work
- the license file is not properly encoded and is dumped in the wrong
place
Also:
- a lot of obvious questions are not answered on the web site or in
the package [1]
- the screen and print priority of the font was never discussed in
Fedora instances, which is not a problem for a minor font but is if
you want it to be one of the primary distro ones
[1]
1. Is this a long-term Red Hat project or will it go stagnant after
initial funding dries out ? (Luxi and Vera-like)
2. Does Red Hat intend to morph it in a community project (with the
usual wiki+bugzilla+open SCM infrastructure) or will contributions be
restricted to the contracted foundry (ie will it need a fork like Vera
before joining community space ?)
3. what is the reasonning behind the licensing choice? Most recent
FLOSS font projects seem to be gravitation towards OFL, and licensing
differences make cross-pollination difficult
4. will unicode coverage ever extend past Latin, Greek and Cyrillic ?
Is Latin, Greek and Cyrillic support limited to most common glyphs or
does it also includes regional variants (welsh, catalan, coptic, etc)
5. is it intended to be the new RHEL or Fedora default font set or
just a windows compatibility pack ?
6. why did Red Hat choose to launch a new font project instead of
improving one of the existing FLOSS fonts? Was metric compatibility
the main reason? If so is it not dangerous to target the windows
2000/XP font set when vista just introduced a new default font set ?
7. who is supposed to field this kind of question?
8. who is supposed to push the package through the Fedora QA process?
--
Nicolas Mailhot