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#1 2018-07-19 14:44:16

christianbundy
Member
Registered: 2018-05-12
Posts: 19

Emoji dependency

Hello!

I'm packaging an application that uses emoji characters as part of the interface (example: paperclip for file attachment), but I'm unsure how to express "emoji" as a dependency. I have two questions:

1. Should the dependency fall under "depends" or "optdepends"? There are non-emoji descriptions for each field, but without a font with emoji characters installed it still shows the little "missing character" rectangle.
2. Which package should I depend on? The first package that comes to mind is "noto-fonts-emoji", but I'm sure there are other fonts that provide many/most/all emoji characters.

Thanks, please let me know if you need more info from me.

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#2 2018-07-19 15:47:38

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,449
Website

Re: Emoji dependency

My recommendation would be no depdends nor optdepends at all.  The software works without any of these fonts - it just doesn't look very good.  Just like most terminals don't explicitly depend on a monospace font - it's is rather assumed that users will ensure their fonts are configured suitably for text to look ok.

More importantly, as your second point touches on, there is no 'emoji' meta-package.  If all the different suitable fonts provided an 'emoji' meta-package you could depend on 'emoji' and leave it up to the user which actual font would satisfy this on their system.  But as there is no such thing, you can't do this.  So don't require a specific font when any one of many fonts would be suitable.

At most, you could have a post install message informing the user that they should ensure they have a suitable font installed that provides emojis for the best experience.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#3 2018-07-19 17:12:57

christianbundy
Member
Registered: 2018-05-12
Posts: 19

Re: Emoji dependency

Thank for the quick response!

At most, you could have a post install message informing the user that they should ensure they have a suitable font installed that provides emojis for the best experience.

Maybe a silly question, but are there any lists of fonts I can/should point the user to that have many/most/all of the emoji in the current Unicode standard? Or is that the sort of thing that the wiki is for?

Nevermind, just found https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Em … nd_symbols. Thanks!

Last edited by christianbundy (2018-07-19 17:44:59)

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