Hi. Since one of our release goals for etch is to remove any documentation from main that doesn't follow the DFSG (for brevity called "non-free documentation" below), here some comments from the release team on the issue. Contents: 1. Things to do 2. Dealing with non-free documentation in one of your packages 3. Filing bugs about non-free documentation --------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Things to do: - Identifying non-free documentation in main and making a mass-bug filing. This should happen ASAP. My current plan is to do 1) a grep run over all debian/copyright files and search for common non-free licenses and then 2) do the same with files whose license is often forgotten to be mentioned in debian/copyright, e.g. man pages and info files. If you know of a package with non-free documentation that will surely not be found by one of these steps (either because the license is a non-standard one or because it isn't mentioned in debian/copyright and only mentioned in files one isn't likely to check) please feel free to file a bug about that right now. Please read the section "filing bugs about non-free documentation" of this mail though. Known non-free documentation licenses are: - GFDL (at least up the current version 1.2) - CC licenses (at least up to the current version 2.5) - OPL and OpenContent License - the current license for RFCs (see also #199810) There is also some documentation under non-free software licenses and under non-free home-made licenses. - Implementing support for the BTS version tracking in britney (i.e. the script that is responsible for the testing migration). Since bugs about non-free documentation are likely to affect testing and unstable versions of a package they should not hinder testing propagation of the packages in most cases. Until britney supports version tracking there is really no good way to achieve this. The code for that is almost ready though and just needs some adjustments on the BTS side to go live. - Setting up an overview page for the release team (and others) to track the status of the filed bugs. We plan to do that with the new usertags feature directly in the BTS but please refer to http://release.debian.org/removing-non-free-documentation for now since there is no good way yet to give you a nice URL to the page directly. We will post any useful URLs there. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Dealing with non-free documentation in one of your packages So what should you do if you find non-free documentation in one of your packages? 1) Don't panic! Take your time to deal with the issue. Now you still have it! But you will have to start _now_. The fact that we haven't yet removed packages from testing for RC bugs about non-free documentation doesn't mean we wont doing it soon. So if you haven't discussed the problem with your upstream yet, if you plan to rewrite the documentation and haven't started yet, if you want to ask for help with convincing your upstream or with rewriting the documentation and haven't done it yet, DO IT NOW! 2) Identify the amount and sort of affected documentation and choose a solution If the affected documentation is really small (e.g. a very minimal man page) you might consider rewriting it completely. In some cases this might actually be faster than to try to contact the original author and asking for a relicensing. If the affected documentation is closely related to a piece of software (and probably packaged with it), e.g. a man page for a executable binary or a reference manual for a library, try ask upstream to relicense it (or at least dual-license it) under the same terms as the software itself. This is probably a good idea in any case because it allows easier copying of material back-and-forth between the source code and documentation In any other case you might ask the author for a relicensing (or at least dual-licensing). There is no known license out there though that was specifically designed for documentation and follows the DFSG. Something like a BSD-style license should be fine but the lack of "copyleft" might be disliked by the author. We hope that we will get some more free documentation licenses in time for etch (both on the side of the GFDL and the CC licenses) but we can't depend on that. If the author objects to relicensing the documentation you have essentially three choices: 1) removing the documentation completely, 2) moving the documentation to non-free, 3) rewriting it. In any case DOCUMENT YOUR CHOSEN SOLUTION IN THE BUG REPORT. If there doesn't exist a bug report about your case consider filing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Filing bugs about non-free documentation I began to retitle bugs about non-free documentation to use a common meta-tag in the subject. After the introduction of the usertags I was urged to look into that as an alternative way of doing it and it proved to be very useful. So here the new way: After filing a bug about non-free documentation please add an usertag "nonfree-doc" and one usertag that describes the license, like "gfdl", "cc", "opl" for the common licenses or something more descriptive like "non-commercial" or "unmodifiable" for custom licenses. Please add these usertags under the user debian-release@lists.debian.org You can do this with a mail to request@bugs.debian.org (or control@bugs.debian.org) like this: <----------------------------------------------> To: request@bugs.debian.org user debian-release@lists.debian.org usertag 123456 + nonfree-doc gfdl <----------------------------------------------> If you want to add something to your bug's subject like [NONFREE-DOC] to make it easier recognisable, just do it, it isn't mandatory though. Gruesse, -- Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org> Debian Release Team http://release.debian.org/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature