Created attachment 883011 [details] emerge --info plasma-integration has a non-USEd dependency on media-fonts/noto. While useful, noto has the obnoxious property of installing literally hundreds (on my system, 360 `style=regular`) fonts, which makes using a font selector an exercise in frustration. "How do I hide Noto font variants?" is a widespread question online (e.g., see below), and I don't believe that KDE actually *requires* it to function. If it is desired to keep noto as a default dependency, at least provide a USE flag to be able to omit it. https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/how-to-get-rid-of-noto-fonts-clutter/5042 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=230195
Upstream will consider the package broken if the dependency is missing. https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-integration/-/commit/f1191def10a04ea3d0e591ca9af9117ad64678ee https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-integration/-/commit/c42f6f220c29fe1dfba6f5bf86fcdfe4540ed9a7
Thanks for the link; I'm trying to track down the actual logic for the `find_package(FontNotoSans)` call. Absent an upstream change, might there be a possibility of either splitting the `media-fonts/noto` package into a "basic" and "full" or of USE-flagging it? (There's already `USE=extra`.) I understand that the goal of Noto is to support literally every character in existence, but its implementation as separately-named fonts is a usability catastrophe.
(In reply to Christopher Smith from comment #2) > Thanks for the link; I'm trying to track down the actual logic for the > `find_package(FontNotoSans)` call. There's not much to track down here. It is marked as a RUNTIME dependency, placed by the upstream devs specifically to notify packagers of having to provide this as a runtime dependency. Failure to do so would put us at a disadvantage when users begin filing bugs upstream as a result of missing these dependencies.
I want to determine *exactly what* the rule is checking for; for example, is it looking for a specific TTF file, or a package-manager package somehow? If the former, might it be possible to split the Gentoo package into a `noto-core` and `noto-all` to limit the surface area? (etc.)
I'll note that there's two issues with Noto: file count and total size. I think both of these stem from the same limitation that some font properties are language specific but possibly(?) limited to be file specific, which results in many large font files which all contain seemingly the same glyphs but with slight differences in, I believe, character spacing or the like. It would be most ideal if KDE would stop insisting on this particular font and picked something more reasonable like any one Noto variant is enough or, really, just accept that fontconfig is meant to provide something sensible when asked for "Noto Sans" or any other typeface defining string. And, if any distro out of the box has an actually problematic behavior when asked for a common typeface, then that should be treated as a distro bug. All in all, whether it's Noto, DejaVu or some other common typeface, they're all, IMVHO, close enough that the exact font metrics should not matter and the result should be reasonable UI. It's also worth noting that Qt and Plasma are supposed to obey user configured fonts in the first place, so it feels very strange to insist upon a Google's typeface in the first place.
