[haiku-development] Re: What is going on with the default font?
- From: Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 17:09:53 +0100
On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 04:56:22AM +1300, Jessica Hamilton wrote:
> For starters, it doesn't fallback to VL-Gothic automatically. Secondly, it
> is a core part of the default look and feel.
It does fallback, I implemented this myself in the app_server. There
seem to be another fallback in place in interface kit that currently
makes it use Bitstream Vera. There are plans to also outsource that
other font, and once that's done the fallback will really be to
VL-Gothic.
> 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.
This is a temporary problem. Now that you have installed the font,
updates will keep it up to date unless you uninstall it. In the default
images, the font is provided, so starting from there, you get the DejaVu
font as usual. Updating from one nightly to another is an unsupported
process currently, so there, you may get some occasional breakage as
things are moved around.
>
>
> > 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.
DejaVu is still the default font, and is still a sensible default. Now,
it can also be uninstalled, if the user decides so, butthat doesn't make
it less default. It is included in the nightly image and the minimal
build profile so any Haiku install will have it, unless the user decides
otherwise.
As I already mentionned, there is one reason to disallow that: making
sure all the glyphs from the font are available (so application
developers can rely on it being there): the play button triangle in the
Sounds preferences, or the stars in tracker rating attribute view are
examples of this. But these glyphs are provided by VL-Gothic so there is
no need to depend on DejaVu there.
I know there is a "bad surprise" moment when updating an existing
nightly and the font isn't installed. But just install it, and you'll
never need to think about this again.
--
Adrien.
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