[reportlab-users] 2.2 - Debian-friendly sample text and fonts

[Andy Robinson]

2008/9/2 Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com>:

> some maybe unrelated comments:

I changed the subject line as this really is a different subject.


> The most important thing for people packaging reportlab for a (Linux)

> distribution is the possibility to actually be able to distribute it. This was

> already mentioned for the 1.x releases and again for the 2.0 release, even

> patches were sent to the ML, but silently ignored. I think even a statement that

> the reportlab project does not want to address these issues would be more honest

> than this non-comment.


Failure to comment on mailing lists is not usually dishonesty, it's
just being busy or having higher priorities. You're right though, we
really didn't want to spend time changing our code to satisfy concerns
that seem extremely, er, theoretical and unrelated to any engineering
issue.


> The stuff which hinders unmodifed distribution are:

>  - inclusion of non-free fonts

>  - the use of a copyrighted example text


I remember a brief discussion 5 years ago on the fonts, but no mention of Homer:
  http://two.pairlist.net/pipermail/reportlab-users/2003-May/001639.html

To be honest we are always short of time and staff might well have
ignored things which did not involve any actual bug or feature and
would have needed a few hours work to implement. Lots of people in
open source would rather spend their limited time on useful
functionality rather than theorizing about license issues.

Nevertheless, Ubuntu is now so huge (I'm typing on it right now) that
I do regard being compatible as an "engineering issue".  We would be
willing to make these changes if it makes your life easier. I am just
not sure if we can do it in time, as we have very few man-hours to
spare for open source work in the next week and have our hands full
with the rearrangement and documenting the changes.  It may be that
we'd need to do a 2.2.1 or 2.3 a few weeks later.


>From a practical viewpoint, we need to include a set of "reasonably

standard" font files to allow our tests and demos to run identically
and out of the box on Windows, Mac OS and Linux; as well as a couple
of "obviously weird fonts".  It looks like either Bitstream Vera or
Liberation will work for the former need; neither was available last
time we looked at this.  Do they both meet your approval?  For the
"obviously weird" category, I'll look around.  We will then need to do
some work on font aliasing mechanisms.

As for the sample text (and tonight is the first time I heard of this
issue), I just did some homework:  the statement at the bottom of our
odyssey text file is actually a copyright statement for the Internet
Classics Archive at MIT, whence that text file came.  But the actual
translation by Butler seems to be in the public domain, according to
www.gutenberg.org.  Does this mean I can just delete the misleading
copyright statement and put in a note saying that it's in the public
domain?

BTW, Gutenberg usually says "Not copyrighted in the United States. If
you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading
this ebook."   Is this good enough or do we need to find an explicitly
"open source" sample text?  If so, what would you recommend?
I don't want any GPL'd fonts or texts sneakily infecting our
BSD-licensed code ;-)



> The other proposed changes, including the inclusion of the addons extension into

> the main source is welcome. It would be nice if reportlab can be installed using

> pure distutils, and doesn't rely on setuptools.


Our thinking right now is distutils this time, then maybe to add an
optional setuptools script or setuptools-based packaging of the same
code a bit later. Primarily as we just don't have time to learn all
the issues with setuptools.

Does setuptools actually make things harder for you?

- Andy