Uhg, Pango utterly broke font support for everything using it (including everything GTK):
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It's not just bitmap fonts (which IMO are useless nowadays, but whatever) but also Type1 fonts, which prominently includes the only free perfect-matched replacements for Helvetical, Times, and Courier - the Nimbus family from ghostscript-fonts package.
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I think so. Distros need to package them, though, and Pango needs to make sure it skips the Type1 results in font enumeration or it will end up selecting them if they come first, then failing to load when it passes them to harfbuzz...
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There's conversion software so distributions should probably convert all their packaged bitmap and Type 1 fonts to OpenType. Bitmap fonts can be converted to an OpenType font providing an embedded bitmap for each supported size, although it will have a terrible vector variant.
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Any sane software project would have loudly announced the impending removal with deprecation warnings added to the code and then only removed it a year later. Of course, we're not talking about a sane software project, but rather GNOME. This is entirely what I expect from them.
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We were just talking about this yesterday:
twitter.com/DanielMicay/st
I wasn't aware of this Pango case at the time, but it's their regular development process. A minor version update removes a bunch of features and APIs. You need to update since it's tied to important fixes, etc.
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Replying to @DanielMicay @jckarter and 5 others
I have high standards for libraries and a deeply seated fear of them making backwards incompatible changes not considering my use case leaving me screwed. I won't touch anything tied to GTK+, GNOME, freedesktop.org. In some ecosystems (web), libraries come and go as fads.
I can't cope with dependencies like this in my projects anymore. Deprecation periods should provide at least a year to migrate away from the old way of doing things. I'm used to it working that way with Android with a new API level yearly, and you have about a year to adopt it.
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