[Pkg-fonts-bugs] ITP: smith -- fonts and keyboards build and test framework

[Nicolas Spalinger]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist

* Package name    : smith
  Version         : 0.3.1
  Upstream Author : SIL International
* URL             : http://github.com/silnrsi/smith
* License         : BSD-3-clause
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description     : Fonts and keyboards build and test framework

Description:  smith is a Python-based framework for building, testing and maintaining WSI (Writing Systems Implementation) components such as fonts and keyboards. 
Smith orchestrates and integrates various tools and utilities to make a standards-based open font design and production workflow easier to manage.

Building a font involves numerous steps and various programs, which, if done by hand, would be prohibitively slow. Even working out what those steps are can take a lot of work. Smith uses a dedicated file at the root of the project (the file is python-based) to allow the user to describe how to build the font. By chaining the different build steps intelligently, smith reduces build times to seconds rather than minutes or hours, and makes build, test, fix, repeat cycles very manageable. By making these processes repeatable, including for a number of fonts at the same time, your project can be shared with others simply, or - better yet - it can be included in a CI (Continuous Integration) system. This allows for fonts (and their various source formats) to truly be libre/open source software and developed with open and collaborative methodologies.


Smith is made up of various subpackages and pulls in a bunch of dependencies (it's a toolchain after all) which still need to be packaged up for Debian. 
There are currently Launchpad build recipes and packaging branches targetting Ubuntu that need to be turned into full Debian packages. 

We plan to unpack the underlying waf framework on which this toolchain is built and ship its source and not just the compressed/pickled binary.

Members of pkg-fonts - Debian Fonts Task Force -  have expressed interest in this toolchain:
https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-fonts/