Stop searching and installing text fonts
In the distant past, LilyPond's build system used to convert text fonts into the required OTF files. Nowadays, it only looks for the OTF files during configure time, then links them during build time and copies them for installation. In addition to being quite complex (more than 100 lines of code in configure.ac), the entire setup has a number of other weak points:
- It is inconsistent. Since commit 500febd2 in 2020, the URW fonts have replaced TeX Gyre as the default text fonts. However, both the configure script and the documentation still require TeX Gyre and optionally recommend the URW fonts. This mirrors the state of the previous switch in commit bb66d05c from 2015.
- It wastes space. If a Linux distribution provides packages for the two font families and a package for LilyPond, the OTF files end up on the user's system (at least) twice.
- It is muddy legal water, at best. LilyPond's build system does not
install the license / notice files, so every distribution blindly
building a package probably does not acknowledge that the URW fonts
are GNU AGPL (with an exception for including the fonts in a PS or
PDF file), and that the TeX Gyre families are licensed under the
GUST font license.
(Note that our official binaries are in a better situation here
because both GUB and the scripts in
release/binaries/copy the license files.)
Then explicitly install the text font files for the official binaries.
Edited by Jonas Hahnfeld