On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 02:59:00PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Sat, Dec 08, 2001 at 02:00:24AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > With a limit of 8,000 or 10,000 bytes, the GNU Emacs Manual would easily > > fail. The GNU Manifesto itself easily blows past those limits. > > Then it would've been a better example to look at for the purposes of > determining a byte count, wouldn't it? You're the one who proposed 8,000 or 10,000 bytes, not me. I proposed 32,768, which is not a problem for the GNU Emacs Manual. > Uh, you're the one writing these new guidelines, you don't have to > "propose" to change them, you just have to change them. If you're going > to, fine, do it. Some people feel that any limit higher than zero for unmodifiable text that isn't a copyright notice or license text is unacceptable. I can't please all of the people all of the time, so I am attempting to gauge which set of amendments would be less problematic. > It's also 25629 compressed-whitespace-bytes. There's around 4MB of stuff > in /usr/share/emacs/20.7/etc on my machine, with a mixture of licenses. The documentation for GNU Emacs 21, at least, appears to be entirely under the GNU FDL with the exceptions noted in my previous mail. Perhaps you didn't notice, but I did quote from the license text of the GNU Emacs Manual. > If you count just GNU (the GNU Manifesto) and WHY-FREE, neither of > which allow alterations, you get some 36991 > compressed-whitespace-bytes, which'd declare our emacs packages > non-free. Emacs 20, perhaps. As far as I can tell, the GNU Emacs Manual for emacs21 is not problematic under the 32kB limit. > I've been using << tr '[:space:]' ' ' | tr -s ' ' | wc -c >> to work out > my compressed-whitespace-byte counts, for reference. FYI, that technique fails to condense whitespace at the beginning of line sufficiently to meet my proposed criterion. > Is the idea here to make minimal changes to answer the "But the GPL > itself is non-free!" FAQ and to allow various bits of free documentation > into main, In part. > or are we trying to make emacs non-free, No, but it is also not my intent to author some decree that specific works shall never be regarded as non-free. The DFSG should be blind as to the identity of the works whose licenses it measures. > or what? I have stated multiple times that my intentions are twofold: one, to clarify how Debian already grants exceptions to the letter of DFSG 3 and 4 when it comes to copyright notices and license texts; and two, to determine a standard by which we should grant exceptions in the future (if at all) to cover other unmodifiable text. I should note that truly minimalist changes to answer the "GPL itself is non-free!" FAQ will increase, not decrease, the likelihood that Emacs (its manual, anyway) will be regarded as non-free. > If the former, then your proposal has effects beyond what you're trying > to do, and if the latter, well, I'm not convinced that's a worthwhile > goal to pursue, personally. So lose the false alternative and work towards a goal that accomplishes the former without necessitating or generating a flamewar about the latter. Granting exceptions to DFSG 3 and 4 for copyright notices and license texts seems uncontroversial. The problem is that we need more exceptions than that if some of the present contents of main are not to come under review. -- G. Branden Robinson | It was a typical net.exercise -- a Debian GNU/Linux | screaming mob pounding on a greasy branden@debian.org | spot on the pavement, where used to http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | lie the carcass of a dead horse.
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