Archive:PackagingDrafts/Font package naming (2008-12-22)

Foreword
This proposal is intended to document font package naming. The current naming has always been implicit in our spec templates(1,2), but experience shows some explicit text would help.

The only actual novelty is the use of foundry names, that some packagers have added by themselves in the past (and thus the naming of our current packages is not consistent). Since other distributions also use foundry names, it has been decided in list and irc discussions that making every font package use them was cleaner than asking their removal in the packages that used them.

Renaming of existing packages that fail this stricter rule will wait for the corresponding policy to be finalised. In the meanwhile getting new package named consistently is a net win.

This is one other bit of the list of package cleanups discussed by the Fonts SIG for the Fedora 11 release.

The change
It consists of the addition one paragraph to our current font policy that should be referenced in Packaging/NamingGuidelines.

Naming

 * 1) Fedora font source packages (src.rpm) are named foundryname-fontprojectname-fonts.
 * 2) Their eventual non-utility subpackages (nosrc.rpm) are named foundryname-fontprojectname-fonts-fontfamilyname.
 * 3) Font package naming uses the lowercase form.

FAQ:
 * For Fedora purposes a “foundry” is an entity that publishes a set of fonts with consistent font QA rules. Thus a generic hosting service such as Sourceforge is not a foundry, but the Open Font Library is.
 * It is good practice to contract foundryname in a short prefix.
 * When foundryname-fontprojectname or fontfamilyname contain the font or fonts affix, it should be skipped to avoid foofont-fonts packages.
 * When fontprojectname includes foundryname, it is not necessary to repeat it.
 * When fontfamilyname includes fontprojectname or foundryname, it is not necessary to repeat them.
 * The use of the fonts suffix is not dependant on the actual number of font files in the package.

When in doubt, ask the mailing list for clarification.