Bug#388246: Is the application of the GFDL to the gcc manpage a GNU or a Debian decision?
The license information in the GCC manpage at the bottom is decidedly
weird. It refers to invariant sections that can't be found in the GCC
manpage. On this topic, I have emailed debian-legal, to this effect:
On 03/05/07, MJ Ray <mjr@phonecoop.coop> wrote:
Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso <jordigh@gmail.com>
> I'm rather confused. The GCC maintainers put the manpage in non-free
> along with the rest of the GCC docs. The manpage says at the bottom
> that it's covered by the GFDL and mentions invariant sections that
> aren't in the manpage. Huh? What does this mean as far as the location
> of the manpage and the GFDL/Debian fiasco?
It probably means that the GCC maintainers have misused the FDL by
accident, similar to the GDB maintainers in the past. I feel putting a
manpage under the FDL is stupid because then the manpage has to include
a copy of the FDL, which is far longer than a typical manpage.
This may be related to bug 412272 or bug 388246
Please report a bug against gcc-doc (or gcc?) if you agree that
non-inclusion of the FDL means that the man page is undistributable.
If you would like to take it further, please research whether the GCC
maintainers know that using the FDL for a manpage has problems. Some GNU
projects use info files, so maybe the manpage in non-free was not made
by them - in which case, it says nothing about the GNU FDL fiasco.
If it is their man page, then it means yet another mature GNU project
has been confused by the FDL.
Hope that helps,
So what, exactly, is the status of the GFDL and GCC's manpage? I still
insist that no GCC manpage is a serious policy violation, especially
considering the importance of a package like GCC.
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