[haiku-development] Re: What is going on with the default font?
- From: Jessica Hamilton <jessica.l.hamilton@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 04:56:22 +1300
On Saturday, 20 December 2014, Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 05:37:41PM -0500, Augustin Cavalier wrote:
> > On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 4:10 PM, John Scipione <jscipione@xxxxxxxxx
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > >
> > > I feel that the fonts and cal are fine as packages, but they should be
> > > included in the default image. The VL-Gothic font may be a decent
> > > fallback for most uses but it surprised me.
>
> The DejaVu font is in the default image. It just won't auto-install if
> you update from a previous nightly. It is indeed still our default font,
> but it is just that, a default choice which you can remove for various
> reasons (for example Japanese or Chinese users have little use for it).
For starters, it doesn't fallback to VL-Gothic automatically. Secondly, it
is a core part of the default look and feel.
The logic for not making this a dependency seems flawed in this particular
instance. Distributions would still be free to change this if they so
desire.
> >
> > > I believe if I had downloaded a nightly image or a release built the
> > > font would show up but I built from source.
> > >
> >
> > Yes. But we aren't trying to focus on working updates (yet), we can start
> > doing that once we get everything outsourced. The DejaVu fonts aren't
> > required, and could be uninstalled by a user who had picked different
> ones.
There is no need to uninstall a font because you change the look and feel.
And whether or not we're focusing on working updates, we should still be
striving for Haiku to be consistent for our user experience. Breaking
things has always been a last resort, even with package management.
It was a jarring experience for me to update my system after being away for
almost two months and have my system feel broken.
> If you start from a complete image (of, say, beta1) the font will be
> there and updates will keep it, unless you explicitly uninstall it.
This is not how Haiku should be behaving. Does nobody remember part of our
motto of sensible defaults? This applies also to our look and feel.
— Jessica
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