Terminal font removed by recent update

I ran an apt upgrade this morning and it removed the package fonts-reform-iosevka-term, leaving the foot terminal in a quite broken state.

manually reinstalling the font returned things to normal. still a weird surprise to run into.

Hi,

I removed the dependency of reform-tools on fonts-reform-iosevka-term with the latest upload but removal of the dependency should not lead to a removal of the package itself. Or was it cleaned up when you ran “apt autoremove”? If you are comfortable with that (make sure it doesn’t contain anything personal) i’d like to see the relevant parts of your /var/log/apt/history.log where the removal happened.

Thank you!

I do run autoremove regularly after an upgrade because I don’t want to run into the issue of /boot filling up with old kernels again.

That probably removed the package

If it’s okay for you, would you mind having a look at the bottom of your /var/log/apt/history.log to make sure that it indeed was the autoremove? That would explain it.

The background of this problem is, that I wanted to upload reform-tools into Debian. For that, all of it must adhere to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Back then the iosevka font was part of reform-tools because it was the default font. So I needed to package the font. Turns out, that these days, the font is half a gigabyte large. Thus, Lukas decided to switch away the default terminal font from iosevka to jetbrains mono. To not break user’s setups, I took a snapshot of the iosevka font back then (it was “only” 40 MB large) and put it into its own package and let that package get published by the MNT repo where it still is and will remain. The reform-tools package gained a dependency on that font such that this package would get installed on user’s systems. But of course since it was only installed as a dependency it was marked by apt as “automatic” and thus now, with reform-tools finally being in Debian itself (and thus i cannot depend on iosevka anymore) an autoremove will suggest to autoremove the font.

I’m unsure how to best handle this problem such that the package keeps being installed… In an attempt to control the damage I added a patch to reform-debian-packages so that the MNT repository will ship a version of reform-tools which still depends on iosevka.

Maybe @zeha has an idea?

Yes, there it it. Removed by autoremove and then manually reinstalled this morning

Start-Date: 2025-02-04  10:53:04
Commandline: apt autoremove
Requested-By: esther (1000)
Remove: linux-kbuild-6.12.10:arm64 (6.12.10-1+reform20250110T183608Z), linux-image-6.12.10-mnt-reform-arm64:arm64 (6.12.10-1+reform20250110T183608Z), fonts-reform-iosevka-term:arm64 (2.3.0-1), reform-qcacld2-6.12.11-mnt-reform-arm64:arm64 (20250202T124717Z), linux-headers-6.12.10-mnt-reform-arm64:arm64 (6.12.10-1+reform20250110T183608Z), linux-headers-6.12.10-common:arm64 (6.12.10-1+reform20250110T183608Z)
End-Date: 2025-02-04  10:53:11

Start-Date: 2025-02-04  13:17:36
Commandline: apt install fonts-reform-iosevka-term
Requested-By: esther (1000)
Install: fonts-reform-iosevka-term:arm64 (2.3.0-1)
End-Date: 2025-02-04  13:17:42
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Thanks a lot for confirming this for me @selfawaresoup !

So, an alternative solution would be to change the font in my foot config, right? And the I can remove the iosevka package again.

Yes. But the iosevka font is not going away i think. So you are free to choose whichever font you like best. :slight_smile:

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I ended up installing and using Hack which I use on my desktop :slight_smile:

Dont have a good idea.
Maybe apt-mark in reform-tools postinst?

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Or Protected: yes on the font package :scream: