On Wed, Feb 03, 1999 at 02:09:44PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote: > > To start, my take on it. > > Obviously, anything we include in main needs to be freely > > distributable. It should probably be "derivable". But I don't think > > it *has* to be "modifiable". > So what do you plan to do if there is a bug in this non-modifiable item you > have placed in the main distribution? (And yes, documentation, and even > artwork, can have bugs in it (ie: "this documentation says rm -rf / is a > good thing", "this icon uses 1024 colors too many")). Then we either say "This document is so crappy, it's not worth the effort to maintain", or "This document is so *good* in other areas that we *have* to make it available, but we might add a note about the rm thing anyway". Consider the packages: doc-rfc (distributable, translatable, reformatable, not modifiable) doc-iana (ditto) emacs20 (files in /usr/doc/emacs20/etc are often distributable but not modifiable, including WHY-FREE) debian-policy (the FSSTND has distribution-only terms for the general public) doc-linux-* (I *believe* some of the HOWTOs in this package are under distribute-only terms. I'm not sure however) I'm inclined to think Debian should continue making all of these documents available as an official part of the system, ie not as part of "non-free". I, personally, liked the suggestion made a while back (possibly by John Goerzen) on -policy. That is, to have a separate category (as per main, contrib and non-free), viz "verbatim", for documents that can be distributed verbatim, possibly translated, that are standards or opinion pieces or whatever else. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred. ``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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