https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20456
--- Comment #57 from Erich E. Hoover erich.e.hoover@gmail.com --- (In reply to Mingye Wang from comment #56)
Thanks for the explanation about .NET apps like Unity, Erich. I do agree that it's probably most convenient to ship the fonts by wine itself now. Is it really necessary to unpack the entire fontforge project into the source tree though? We are unlikely to do any change besides the metadata... right?
At the moment you only have to do that if you're going to rebuild the fonts, which is true of both wine and wine-staging. If we were to build a tool that just takes a system font and "renames" it then that tool might be able to be a lot simpler, but wine in general will still need fontforge to build some of the other fonts we use (not all of wine's fonts are direct replacements with no changes).
It's also possible that we could use the system-wide fontforge if someone was willing to upstream the patches we have, there's a number of fontforge behaviors that result in large diffs (for tiny changes) and our patches disable those features (timestamps, spurious spaces that get added to the metadata, saving the fontforge "state"). I know that someone got some of our changes upstreamed about five years ago, but I don't believe that they finished that effort. If you're willing to look into it then I'm sure there are a few packagers that would be happy to be able to use the system-wide fontforge ;)