[OpenFontLibrary] Why Drupal?

[Schrijver]

btw, really cool the wiki is back up, thanks!

> 
> I think since most designers do not use version control, and do not
> plan to learn it, we shouldn't bother them with that.
> 

Of all the people contributing original designs to the OFLB, how many of them are professionally educated as type designers, or work in that field? I guess it’s only you? Even if the mainstay of professional designers are not into version control, the situation is different here.

OFLB right now I think has an audience of software people who are into typefaces. Who I might guess could be quite interested in using version control.

See Barry’s problems with uploading. It doesn’t make sense. If his font would just be a repository at oflb it would be trivial to throw all the stuff in there. It’s not like Barry doesn’t know how to do that.

But, as I said, it should be behind the scenes, so that you do not necessarily have to come into contact with it. If you upload, the software transparently creates a repository for you. After that the software allows you to overwrite your font-files with new versions and tada without knowing anything about version control you are using it.

> I see OFLB as an "upload bucket," and if a designer publishes a new
> version of a font, it should be highlighted as a derivative from the
> same username of the original (an easy feature to code) and removing
> files should not be possible at a file level, only removing the entire
> font family record.
> 

I have a conceptual problem with this approach. You make it costly to make a new version where it should be super easy. Release early, release often!

Your proposed architecture centers on final designs, much in the same way a traditional font foundry would be doing.

But like Ben L says oflb could also be a place for developing fonts. 

I think that’s part of the deal with open source. There is no final product. And after the early release people will want to join in. It’s not like you design a font, more like, for a while you are it’s lead developer.

imho enabling collaboration will be what drives open source type development forward.

A commercial font foundry will be able to attract really good designers and have inhouse production staff to completely sanitize and quality-control and whatever their fonts. So they can deliver a polished product, attributed to a single designer.

If open source design goes this route imho it can only ever be an impoverished version of the approach because open source lacks the money to pull it off.

> I think another site centered around version control would be better,
> probably based on Trac or IkiWiki or Launchpad (ie, web views to DVCS
> already existing.)


Still, if you think OFLB has no place for this, we should have it at least tightly integrate with hosting services so it becomes super easy to push your binaries to OFLB from your project.