[pkg-wine-party] Bug#818925: Wine's forked version of fontforge

[Alexandre Julliard]

Jens Reyer <jre.winesim at gmail.com> writes:

> Wine and Debian are both using the quite old fontforge version
> 20120731-b, the patches apply cleanly in Debian.
> But upstream is actively developing and in Debian someone is working on
> packaging a recent version (not sure with what outcome, e.g. afaik there
> is at least one upstream regression blocking an update).
> Are there any plans in Wine to update to a newer version?

No plans currently, but I can certainly look into it if it helps.

> 1. Various hacks to avoid putting timestamps in generated files (AJ).
>
> No relevant changes upstream, but there is some work going to allow one
> to specify the timestamp in order to get the build
> deterministic/reproducible. Would this make this patch obsolete?
>
> I don't know why upstream wants timestamps at all, nor what problems
> these cause for Wine. Is this Wine specific, or would it make sense to
> drop timestamping upstream, too?

I don't know why they'd want timestamps either; an option to set the
timestamp could certainly work, though getting rid of them would be even
better IMO. It's needed in Wine because the files are in git (to avoid
requiring fontforge at build time), and I don't want spurious diffs
every time I run make.

> 2. - Avoid outputting trailing spaces in sfd files (AJ).
>
> About a third seems to be applied in 20160404. I assume the rest would
> still be relevant if Wine updated its fontforge version.
>
> Is this patch only relevant for creating fonts/glyphs, but not for
> building the TrueType fonts?
> Looks like a good candidate for forwarding to upstream.

Same here, it's to avoid spurious diffs, especially since git will then
remove the spaces again when applying patches etc. It should make no
difference when building the ttf files.

> 3. Enable the width of individual bitmap strikes to be altered (Huw Davies).
>
> Since the import of upstream version 20120731-b this patch only has a
> third of its original size. Are the remaining Wine changes still
> necessary, or are they cruft? If still needed, I guess they should be
> pushed upstream.
>
> In 20160404 not much seems to have changed, but the containing file
> bitmapview.c was moved ("splitting ui code from fontforge/ to
> fontforgeexe/").
>
> Same as above: is this only needed when creating fonts? Looks like a
> candidate for upstream.

I believe it's still needed, I'm not sure why that part didn't get
upstream.

> 4. Don't save the selected state. (Huw Davies)
>
> I found no relevant changes upstream.
> No idea about this.

I believe this is also to avoid diffs when working on the files.

There are other things like the fontforge window size that are saved in
the sfd files. Currently I remove them from the diff manually, but it
would certainly be nice to fix that upstream too.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org