#1140680 Problematic license: some icons not DFSG free and not built from source

#1140680#5
Date:
2026-06-24 13:38:45 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Thomas,

I'm looking at 7.4.47-1, and see that it is built using the
pre-compiled fonts.  This has two serious issues:

(1) Some of the icons have a problematic license: the LICENSE file
reads:

# Icons: Apache 2.0 (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
Some of the icons are redistributed under the Apache 2.0 license. All other
icons are either redistributed under their respective licenses or are
distributed under the Apache 2.0 license.

The brand icons are not included in the Apache 2.0 license, so cannot
be included in this package.  They were going to be removed in version
8.0.0 of the icon font, but it looks like all development on this
package has stopped.

(2) The package is not built "from source", which are the SVG icons in
the MaterialDesign-SVG repository.

I would be happy to fix both of these issues, but I don't want to mess
up your repository.  To do the fix, I would switch to the
MaterialDesign-SVG repository as the primary source and add the
MaterialDesign-Font-Build repository as an additional component.  You
can see what I have done with the new fonts-materialdesignicons-legacy
package to fix these issues; I would use an (almost) identical
structure with the version 7 package
(fonts-materialdesignicons-webfont).  However, I don't know how to do
this within the OpenStack build structure as specified here:
https://wiki.debian.org/OpenStack/PackageUpdate#Import_upstream_changes_to_the_debian.2FOSRELEASE_branch

Some possible options (some of which overlap):

(a) We don't continue to follow the OpenStack setup for this specific
repository.  I'm guessing that this is unlikely to be much of a
problem, as it looks like the package is abandoned upstream, but I
don't fully understand how the OpenStack team works, so I am not at
all certain about this.

(b) You set it up with the new source and additional component in a
way which is compatible with OpenStack, and then I do the rest of the
work.  Note, though, that you cannot simply clone the upstream
MaterialDesign-SVG repository, because a whole bunch of files have to
be excluded; the upstream version number will become 7.4.47+dfsg.

(c) You find an alternative way of addressing this bug, and I'm
totally open to that possibility too!

(d) We take this package out of the OpenStack team and migrate it to
the Fonts team, so it does not need to follow the OpenStack protocol.

Best wishes,

   Julian

#1140680#10
Date:
2026-06-29 11:57:28 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Julian,

Thanks for this bug report.

The way it works for Horizon, to find its webfont, is through the
python-xstatic-font-awesome package. This is a Python module that is
supposed to contain the webfonts. It's made in a way so that it is easy
to patch to make it use the system's font package instead.

Currently, what's being done, is a simple "debianize.patch" that does:

-#BASE_DIR = '/usr/share/javascript/d3'
+BASE_DIR = '/usr/share/fonts-font-awesome'

so that assets are read from /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome.

If we remove the patch, and let the Python module install its assets, we
could replaced the installed assets by corresponding symlinks to the
system font package: that's another very valid way to fix the problem.

At this time, I very much lack time to address it. Best would be if you
could take over the current fonts-materialdesignicons-webfont, or work
on the python-xstatic-font-awesome package, to solve the issue, and make
it so that it would point to the current package you're maintaining.
It'd be really awesome if you could work on that. Please let me know.

In the mean time, I do not think this bug deserves the current severity
that you've set. I really would love to see this bug fixed, but I do not
think it's serious enough to grant the removal of Horizon, especially
considering that the affected icons aren't probably the ones that
Horizon is using. Removing both packages from testing will not help.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)