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Is it still connecting to Google Fonts?

Open Issue:

Remove Google surveillance #847

https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/issues/847



By default, yes. Anyone can fix that in their books in the meantime by generating the theme and then deleting some lines.

It is tough to get contributors and maintainers of projects like this, and this issue in particular has been bombed by folks who don't even use Rust and are acting like the sky is falling. It's incredibly demotivating.


I wish people in general could get used to the idea that not everything is designed with them in mind, and they might not be the intended audience.

If privacy is your number one priority and you absolutely can't have Google "spying" on you, then a lot of software and websites probably just aren't for you.

Instead, they bombard people who are doing great things for free, making them make little changes to please them instead of great changes that could please most people.

I'd be less critical of them if they were submitting PRs instead of just bug reports.


>I'd be less critical of them if they were submitting PRs instead of just bug reports.

So, exactly what the author of that issue did on the same day they made the issue.


So, they did submit a PR (which is great!), but it wasn't acceptable to the maintainer. Other things were suggested, but none of the PRs met the requirements, and so none were accepted.


> I'd be less critical of them if they were submitting PRs instead of just bug reports.

See, this is what's bizarre to me about this particular problem - the kind of people who (1) worry about these types of things and (2) are running CLI software from Github should be capable of figuring out how to implement the feature(s) they want and submit pull requests instead of opening issues. This is FOSS software, the price of entry is $0, so I don't get how people think they're entitled to any particular feature without implementing it themselves, especially features as marginally-useful as not requesting fonts from Google.


>It is tough to get contributors and maintainers of projects like this, [...]

It has had a PR since day one, from the same person that opened the issue.

>[...] and this issue in particular has been bombed by folks who don't even use Rust and are acting like the sky is falling.

It has been "bombed" by people who use mdBook, or rather who no longer use mdBook because they were affected by the issue in question. The issue is on rust-lang/mdBook, not rust-lang/rust, and I don't see anywhere in its README.md that says you need to be a Rust user to use mdBook.


> It has had a PR since day one, from the same person that opened the issue.

Absolutely, and I'm appreciative of that. As you can see from that PR, it is unclear what the procedure is to get said PR merged; there's assertions that this is breaking, and assertions that it is not. This conversation was continued in the issue, and the PR author did not respond. It's effectively in a holding pattern where nobody has responded to the maintainer's feedback about the PR, either by updating the original PR or opening a new one.

Part of why this has taken a while is that mdbook has not had particularly strong leadership over its existence, due to what I said. The original author wrote enough for his purposes, I tweaked stuff for my purposes, but it's never been anyone's specific focus. There have been periods with effectively no maintenance. That's how open source goes.

> It has been "bombed" by people who use mdBook, ... I don't see anywhere in its README.md that says you need to be a Rust user to use mdBook.

To be clear, I do not think everyone in this issue is from some sort of "outside." But there's at least one person in that thread who started on it immediately after publicly trashing Rust. He then continues to be abrasive on the issue.

This contributes to a lack of bandwidth, at least for me. I'm not gonna bother touching this PR when there is so much other work to do, and I don't have to deal with this kind of thing. (I am also not the primary maintainer of mdbook so I don't know how the actual maintainers feel about it, maybe they aren't affected by it in the same way.)

I expect that someday, this will get sorted out, if the folks who care so much actually put in the effort to make the changes happen. Or maybe they'll use another tool. I think that's also totally fine. This was part of a broader move to remove google fonts across Rust properties, most of them were taken care of, because folks pushed and got the work done. I think this might be the last bit?


I understand your lack of motivation to fix the issue, and have been in a similar boat in some of my own personal projects.

>To be clear, I do not think everyone in this issue is from some sort of "outside." But there's at least one person in that thread who started on it immediately after publicly trashing Rust. He then continues to be abrasive on the issue.

Ah, I thought you meant "folks" to mean everyone posting on the issue / upvoting the OP. Thank you for clarifying. Assuming you're talking about who I think you're talking about, I can understand your position.




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