  BDF Considered Harmful?  BDF font files have not been allowed
in Debian packages for a while, as per Debian policy.  I emailed
Russ Allbery last year about the possibility of allowing BDF
fonts back into Debian for reasons that follow.  He was willing
to entertain the idea.  I waited for the lenny release before
bringing up this possible change in policy.  Currently BDF fonts
are supposed to be converted to PCF.  BDF is a plain ASCII
format, and PCF is binary.  Thus a PCF font file will be more
compact than its BDF source.  However, the original BDF version
can contain ASCII comments that are not preserved in the PCF
version.  These comments often contain information such as
author, copyright, and licensing information. With the BDF
versions discarded, that information is lost -- there is no
round-trip conversion from BDF to PCF to BDF.  Thus a blind BDF-
to-PCF conversion can discard valuable information the author
intended to remain with the font.  This can be significant given
the abundance of BDF fonts i