Actually, it looks like gnu-free-fonts is merely the name of the source package - https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/gnu-free-fonts

The actual rpms are called gnu-free-mono-fonts, gnu-free-sans-fonts , gnu-free-serif-fonts https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=2308657

OK for Fedora 38 and OpenBSD - tested on real systems

Documentation preview for this PR (built with commit b7032a1; changes) is ready! 🎉

Thanks for fixing this. LGTM.

Did this pass the "CI Linux Incremental" test? Perhaps "CI Linux Incremental" does not check optional system packages.

I tested with some fedora versions. It works well.

I read this:

    # Set this to 'yes' instead of 'no' to ignore missing system packages - by installing them one by one
    # and ignoring errors.  We use that to take care of old versions of distributions.
    # For -maximal environments, the default is 'yes' but later we override it for rolling distributions
    # (but not for unstable distributions that often have intermittent issues).
                                               IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no
    maximal:                                   IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=yes

but I still don't understand the purpose of IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGE. So would you explain this statement

According to https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=gnu-free-sans-fonts, the packages are available for fedora >=37, EPEL 9, centos-7, centos-stream-8. Accordingly we remove the setting IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no from fedora < 37.

?

I tested with some fedora versions. It works well.

Thanks for testing!

I read this:

    # Set this to 'yes' instead of 'no' to ignore missing system packages - by installing them one by one
    # and ignoring errors.  We use that to take care of old versions of distributions.
    # For -maximal environments, the default is 'yes' but later we override it for rolling distributions
    # (but not for unstable distributions that often have intermittent issues).
                                               IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no
    maximal:                                   IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=yes

but I still don't understand the purpose of IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES.

It's all about balancing the effective use of system packages vs. the burden of maintenance:

• If system packages that we refer to are renamed or become unavailable otherwise, we want the CI to tell us; we don't want to find out from user complaints. So for standard packages on reasonable versions of distributions, we make it a hard error if the listed system packages cannot be installed.
• To avoid a much larger burden of maintenance, we only have one set of distro package information for each large family of distributions. All of fedora, centos, rhel is recorded in fedora.txt. All of debian, ubuntu, and the various value-added or sugar-added variants is recorded in debian.txt etc. So if a variant misses one of our standard packages – tough luck, we'll just set IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=yes for this variant. This means that when testing that variant, we determine the available subset of packages dynamically. When a package disappears, we can see it in the log, but the test of the platform is still supposed to go through.
• Testing the -maximal package configuration has two main purposes: 1) To test that system packages that we don't know how to use (no spkg-configure.m4) don't break the build by their sheer presence on the system. 2) For tests of optional packages that depend on other optional packages.

So would you explain this statement

According to https://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=gnu-free-sans-fonts, the packages are available for fedora >=37, EPEL 9, centos-7, centos-stream-8. Accordingly we remove the setting IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no from fedora < 37.

?

Before this PR, we had the line

fedora-34:                                 IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no

This marked fedora-34 as a very reasonable distro variant: We require that all system packages listed in fedora.txt, whether standard or optional, whether we know how to use them or not, must be installable. And running the fedora-34-maximal tested that, giving a hard error otherwise.

The comment from the ticket description says that because gnu-free-sans-fonts is not available on fedora-34, we should no longer demand that fedora-34-maximal has all listed packages. By removing the line setting IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no, we are back to using the default: IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=no for -minimal and -standard, but IGNORE_MISSING_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=yes for -maximal.

It's admittedly a bit twisty...

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Thanks!