Apologies if I'm in the wrong place, but I've been through this several times now in other places, and was ultimately pointed here. So here goes...
Maybe I'm the exception to the norm here, but I have multiple WINE prefixes which all run different things - mostly games. Rather than install install the Microsoft Core Fonts in each prefix and chew up disk space, it makes more sense to install them once at the main system level.
However, on most versions of Ubuntu, and anything based on it (like Mint), when you try to install ttf-mscorefonts-installer you are also prompted to install 8 other packages, if they aren't already installed (on distributions like Mint, they are NOT):
* python3-debconf
* python3-distro-info
* python3-distupgrade
* python3-update-manager
* ubuntu-advantage-tools
* ubuntu-release-upgrader-core
* update-manager-core
* update-notifier-common
As I understand it, this happens because the ttf-mscorefonts-installer package in the Ubuntu repository depends on update-notifier-common which itself depends on the rest of the listed packages even though none of these extras are actually required for those TTFs to be installed or even work, and probably shouldn't be marked as dependencies in the first place.
On top of that, the Core Fonts package can be obtained upstream from Debian directly without the extra packages and installed locally with gdebi, dpkg, Synaptic, or any other Debian package manager you happen to have laying around, without breaking anything.
On closer inspection, we can see that the package itself primarily installs a POSIX shell script which handles the actual fetching and installation of the desired fonts, which are downloaded via the following list of URLs:
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/andale32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/arial32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/arialb32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/comic32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/courie32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/georgi32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/impact32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/times32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/trebuc32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/verdan32.exe
* http://downloads.sourceforge.net/corefonts/webdin32.exe
That script has the following dependencies:
* debconf
* gawk / AWK
* coreutils
* cabextract
* gzip
That's it. Nothing appears to have anything to do with the packages in question. Elsewhere in the package, files for Lintian are used, found in the 'lintian' package, presumably to ensure the package meets Debian or Ubuntu packaging requirements; however, I don't believe this is a dependency, rather that it supports being checked and verified by Lintian.
From looking through the whole package, I see absolutely zero reason why ubuntu-release-upgrader-core and associated packages are marked as a dependency for the Microsoft Core Fonts package. And though the control file does have 'update-notifier-common' marked as a dependency, I don't recall seeing anything about a notification in the script, but maybe I missed something.
Either way, having update-notifier-common being marked as a dependency of ttf-mscorefonts-installer seems unnecessary and potentially confusing, especially on distributions like Mint (the one I'm using) which follow their own update and upgrade path and could potentially be broken by allowing the native Ubuntu Upgrade Release path to be followed.
True, you can technically get around this by passing --no-install-recommends to APT, but that's more of a short-term solution to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Is there a way to remove this dependency hell from the core fonts package? Or, can somebody at least explain the logic and reasoning for adding these dependencies to a TTF package?
