Re: A concrete proposal
On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 09:00:00PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> The following is a concrete proposal, but it has two very important
> BLANKS in it, with some suggested things that could fill in the
> BLANKS. My purpose in giving this is that I think we can all agree
> about everything here except the BLANKS themselves. This might help
> move us along towards consensus.
Thanks, this makes it much easier to say something about the issue.
One comment I also wanted to make about your summary:
> All invariant text must be nondocumentary: that it does not need to
> be changed in order to keep the documentation an accurate reflection
> of the operation of the program, which must itself always be
> modifiable.
I like the term coined by RMS instead of "documentary":
"technical, generally useful information". This term is a bit broader,
it would include also such documentary texts, that are not documentary to
the program itself, but to other programs etc. It does not include
statements of personal belief etc. (Or maybe the secondary section
definition of the GFDL can be used, which is even stricter).
> I envision three fillins for BLANKONE:
>
> BLANKONE OPTION A: "copyright statements, ascriptions of authorial
> credit, license texts, and warranty disclaimers."
>
> BLANKONE OPTION B: "copyright statements, licenses, and incidentally
> associated material."
>
> BLANKONE OPTION C: "one kilobyte".
>
> (Note that the exact number in BLANKONE OPTION C should be thought
> about if people like that option.)
I would be happy with any of these, but for clarity, something like A or B
seems better to me than C. I don't really care, you could add "advertising"
to this and so on, if it helps to make more people agree. (Of course I
don't have to care because I don't want BLANKTWO OPTION A, so it is not so
important to list all possible cases in BLANKONE).
> I envision three fillins for BLANKTWO:
>
> BLANKTWO OPTION A: "no".
>
> BLANKTWO OPTION B: "thirty-two kilobytes".
>
> BLANKTWO OPTION C: "one tenth of one percent of the total size of
> the documentation".
C seems to be okay, although I would also be happy with "a small amount",
and leave the exact amount to the subsequent flamewars on debian-legal
(which will happen anyway if there is a package with 0.011 percent etc).
If the "guideline" aspect of the text is sufficient to weaken the fixed
limite (eg if it is agreed that 32769 bytes are ok, or that 0.01001 percent
would be okay), then that's fine as well.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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