Improving font packages

Fedora includes a large selection of font packages. Unfortunately, due to lack of strong font release conventions, variable packager experience, commitment or attention to detail, uneven package complexity, they're not all to the same quality standard.

This page will help you improve our font package quality pool by specifying ways you can help enhance existing packages, and ways you can tune new packages during creation.

Language checks


To give users more flexibility, especially in an automatic font installation context, we require fine-grained font packages.

Unfortunately that also increases the number of summaries and descriptions font packagers need to write, and upstreams do not always provide ready-to-use text snippets. Many packagers would appreciate proposals to improve those:

Naming
We have strict naming rules that all font packages should follow. Please check they're respected.

spec files
Check out the files the packager used, compare them to the official templates in fontpackages-devel, and report discrepancies which have no justification.

Graphical diff tools such as meld can be especially helpful.

$ meld foo.spec /etc/rpmdevtools/spectemplate-fonts-bar.spec
 * 1) yum install fontpackages-devel meld

comps
Check all our font packages are properly declared in the fonts or legacy-fonts comps groups (once they are approved).

Checking the package builds
Make sure the package builds in Mock or (if he's already a packager) in a Koji scratch build

Checking package sanity
Check the resulting packages with rpmlint $ rpmlint package1.rpm … packageN.rpm
 * 1) yum install rpmlint

Checking font specific issues
Check the resulting packages with repo-font-audit: $ mkdir /tmp/testrepo $ mv package1.rpm … packageN.rpm /tmp/testrepo $ createrepo /tmp/testrepo $ repo-font-audit testrepo file:///tmp/testrepo
 * 1) yum install fontpackages-tools createrepo

Checking upgrade paths
(when a set of packages is intended to replace another)

Notes: