On Wed, Nov 18, 1998 at 04:16:14PM -0500, Peter S Galbraith wrote: > > The problem is that one of the license requirements (3c (?)) > > puts it into non-free. > > For those who haven't read it, here is the (weird) section 3C: > > 3c) You must not add notes to the Document implying that the > reader had better read something produced using Texinfo. <laugh> It might fail the DFSG, but if you've seen it you know what the author of that clause means.. For the longest time even dpkg's man page said that the man page was out of date, probably incomplete, and you should refer to texinfo documentation. So many man pages do that, and the whole point of this was to update the man pages and NOT cause the user to have to put up with emacs or info. > Ben Gertzfield wrote: > > > Again, the DFSG can't really apply to documentation. Look at the Perl > > FAQ; we'd have to put it in non-free if we applied the DFSG to > > documentation. > > Meaning that we aren't going to modify documentation in such a way anyway, > and that documentation is allowed _no modification_ in its license? > > But _why_ did he put that in there anyway? Does he hate texinfo? Or does > he hate the fact that documentations get scattered all over the place? Probably the answer is "yes". Think about it, why is there a man page if the man page says simply "read the texinfo documentation." The whole point was to make the manpages NOT be out of date and tell you that if you want to really know how to use the program you needed to read some texinfo. It's probably a personal annoyance on the author's part at the authors for not bothering to keep the de-facto standard method for finding documentation in a reasonable manner up to date and replacing it with some big obnoxious mess requiring an all-in-one program like info or whatever to read it. With man, you have many options like which pager you use, etc.. You don't get that with info and don't even get me started on emacs. I don't need a man reader that takes a minumum of 12 megs to do anything useful. -- Show me the code or get out of my way.
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