repository clean up

[shinenelson]

GitHub reports that the size of the repository is over 64MB.

I have not investigated this thoroughly, but I think that we could reduce the size of the repository considerably if we avoided committing binary blobs.

Our primary build artifacts - the font files ( except the SVG font ) are binary blobs. Tracking different versions of these binary blobs is probably what is increasing the size of the repository considerably.

Nevertheless, these are artifacts that should be released; that is, these artifacts should not reside in the repository itself. Rather, they should be in the release archives ( tarballs and the like ) that are created as part of a release. Currently, we generate these artifacts only during releases anyway.

Hence, my proposal is to remove the build artifacts from the repository and maintain them as build artifacts in the release assets.

PS : We have not used GitHub's Release feature in the past, so this would mean starting to use it.

[seanking2919]

For building the artifacts, I would recommend looking into using a CI/CD solution (i.e. Drone) to automate the process of it. I know that we're not on GitLab, but if we were, we could easily use their built-in CI/CD feature to build the fonts. I'm not super familiar with GitHub Actions, but if they allow you to do automated CI/CD in some way, I'm sure you could easily do that here, too.

[shinenelson]

GitHub Actions is the CI/CD offering from GitHub in-par with GitLab's CI/CD. Both provide container-based runtimes that allows one to do whatever they would like ( with the usual restrictions and limitations, of course ).

So, yes, the end goal would be to automate the release process with GitHub Actions which builds the fonts as artifacts and puts them in the Release Assets rather than the repository itself.