Repackage MS Fonts mscorefonts

[TraceyC77]

With the upcoming deprecation of 3rd party, we need another way to legally allow our users to install MS Fonts. They are very highly valued by users and make many apps look a lot better than without them.

Other distros have done this, see what Arch or Ubuntu are doing here.

[brent111]

With the upcoming deprecation of 3rd party, we need another way to legally allow our users to install MS Fonts. They are very highly valued by users and make many apps look a lot better than without them.

Other distros have done this, see what Arch or Ubuntu are doing here.

[as a Solus user who needs Microsoft ttf's for work reasons, I salute your pro-activity on this. thank you. ]

[HarveyDevel]

Unless I am missing something I do not see any distribution packaging mscorefonts. I've only seen it in the AUR.

The license does appear to allow distribution but with restrictions that make it useless. You can only provide them unmodified in their .exe form.

https://corefonts.sourceforge.net/eula.htm
https://corefonts.sourceforge.net/faq8.htm

So there is not a lot we can do.

[Staudey]

Debian has ttf-mscorefonts-installer which is a custom installer that downloads and installs the files, thus avoiding repackaging them (if I understand correctly)

https://packages.debian.org/sid/fonts/ttf-mscorefonts-installer

So similar to the current 3rd-party mechanism, just contained within a special package/app. Of course this means that the actual installed font files will not be handled by package management

Another possibility is having people simply use ypkg to build their own mscorefonts package with a provided recipe. So just like the current 3rd-party process, just with the modern package build tooling. This has the advantage of having a clean package install/uninstall mechanism, but is slightly more involved for the user (though not much more than the 3rd-party repo CLI instructions)

[HarveyDevel]

Yeah avoiding solbuild and using ypkg directly would be much easier for the average user, but the process will change again come stone/boulder.

Wonder if there is a GUI app for downloading and extracting mscorefonts to ~/.fonts/ similar to how ProtonUp-Qt works for managing proton. Not sure I hate myself enough to create such an app but... maybe I do?

[malfisya]

I think rather than simply archiving 3rd-party repo, we should just move it to a different Orgs altogether. So, people can still use it but without Solus guarantees of it working.

Maybe people that used to contribute to 3rd party repo would be willing to maintain it (Or at least willing to take ownership). Like @Staudey and @ahahn94 .