Announcement: System fonts port tree

[Nils Breunese]

Aaron Madlon-Kay <amake at macports.org> wrote:

> - Why make this?
> 
> I like to keep my fonts up to date, and MacPorts is a great way to do so.

I love this idea!

> I asked about including system font ports in the default ports tree a long time ago on the dev list. The main problem is that it’s not “nice” to put the install files outside of the blessed MacPorts directories ($prefix, /Applications/MacPorts, etc.), so some sort of mechanism that symlinks to /Library/Fonts would need to be developed.

Is the fact that it’s not “nice” to install files outside of the blessed directories reason enough to keep these ports out of the official ports tree? For fonts to work on macOS they need to be in a directory where macOS will look for them. I don’t really see the point of putting them in another directory and then creating symlinks outside the MacPorts tree.

I maintain the openjdk* ports and those install their files under /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines, because that’s where the macOS Java tools (like /usr/libexec/java_home) will look for Java Virtual Machines. These font ports sound like a pretty similar case to me.

Nils.