Unnecessary (?) font dependencies

[Kenneth Hanson]

I originally posted this as a question under the "Answers" section and was encouraged to report this as a bug.

I noticed the the (large set of) M+ fonts were added to Retroarch as a dependency recently, when they appeared in LibreOffice and investigated using Synaptic. It looks like only one of the fonts is actually used, and furthermore appears to be embedded in the source. See: https://github.com/libretro/retroarch-assets/tree/master/xmb/monochrome and https://github.com/libretro/retroarch-assets/commit/3bac2689d8caa84091d37f7e6355703239af67e2.

If this is the case, then the font dependency should be unnecessary. Perhaps likewise for Roboto.

Full disclosure: I actually noticed this first with the "Libretro Stable" PPA on Xenial, but being unfamiliar with Launchpad found the same problem with the official Zesty package and ended up posting against the distro package from there. Not sure if I should make a duplicate post for the PPA.

[Kenneth Hanson (khanson679)]

Just found out what is going on (immediately after posting this bug -- figures).

There's code in the packaging...whatever it is...that replaces the font files with symlinks to system fonts: https://git.launchpad.net/~libretro/libretro/+git/retroarch-assets-debian/tree/links.in.

I suppose that closes this "bug". Still, I'm of the opinion that requiring a 70MB dependency just to get a 1.6MB font is counterproductive, but where do I post a bug report about this?? As should be obvious by now, I'm finding it difficult to figure out how everything on Launchpad connects.

[Kenneth Hanson (khanson679)]

No response in nearly a year. This is extremely frustrating.

To clarify the above comment, this is not really about saving disk space, per se. Rather, the point is that in this case, the "shared library" approach wastes space, which completely defeats the purpose.

The real frustration for ordinary users is that when packages like this pull in large collections of fonts, they pollute the font lists of applications like LibreOffice. The kneejerk response I've seen is "you should disable them with a font manager", but the current options are defunct (fontmatrix) or so broken as to be unusable (Gnome and KDE's font managers).