Open source build system

[bkmgit]

It may be helpful to additionally use a scriptable open source build system such as:

• smith
• afdko
• fontforge
• fontparts
• ufo2ft
  to generate the font files. Of these, ufo2ft seems simplest to use.

[djrrb]

Thanks...agreed. FYI, I’m not going to take immediate action on this, as I believe someone is working on a larger update/cleanup of this old repository that I think will address this as well as #75.

[bkmgit]

Ok. Is the update/cleanup available in fork? The script in #77 could be used to automatically generate fonts using GitHub actions. If it would be helpful, can refactor it to generate all the files needed for a release, but probably some tests/checks on the generated files would still be useful.

[djrrb]

Ok. Is the update/cleanup available in fork?

I’m actually not sure what the current status is. I’ll check in and see.

The script in #77 could be used to automatically generate fonts using GitHub actions. If it would be helpful, can refactor it to generate all the files needed for a release, but probably some tests/checks on the generated files would still be useful.

Thanks for that! I agree that some testing against the current release would be useful, but I’m hesitant to ask you to spend any more time if the work is going to be overwritten in a mater of months. Hopefully the straightforward ufo2ft build is close enough to the released version to meet your immediate needs?

Again, much appreciated!

[davelab6]

Please use the gftools builder for this, we are standardizing on it at GF

[bkmgit]

@davelab6 Thanks. QA process in gftools seems very helpful. There is a related issue on packaging for Linux distributions googlefonts/gftools#12 - most distributions at present will take ttf or otf files and package these directly. However, some have interest in building the fonts directly and then packaging these. During the packaging process, at least for Fedora, it should be possible to do everything offline with software tools that are packaged for Fedora. It seems gftools uses fontmake which uses ufo2ft. Using gftools for generating fonts from ufo sources with GitHub actions seems ok, but is less well suited for packaging in distributions due to the large number of additional dependencies that need to be packaged. Are there plans to deprecate ufo2ft since it seems quite useful for linux packaging, and was previously available in Fedora repositories?

[justvanrossum]

This has been implemented in #85.