Re: "testing" improvements

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Anthony Towns mentioned:

Here's a thought experiment for y'all. First, you notice that glibc
is holding lots of things in testing up. Second, you notice it has two
outstanding RC bug reports: #181493 about Sun RPC code being potentially
non-free, and #181494 about the GNU FDL as used in glibc being non-free.
Third, you notice not much has been done about these bugs. The question
is: is your instinctive response:

        (a) Post to Debian lists / websites about how horrible all this 
is,
            and how someone (else) should do something about it.

        (b) Try to convince everyone (or at least me) that those bugs
            aren't that important and shouldn't hold back glibc from
            testing.

        (c) Take it upon yourself to contact -legal to make sure you
            understand the problems (and that they're real), and to
            talk to upstream, and get the license clarified or changed
            as appropriate.

--
My response is (c).

However:

RMS and the FSF have indicated repeatedly that they have no intention of 
removing the invariant sections from the GCC, Emacs, and Glibc manuals.
And that they have no intention of changing the FDL, despite Debian's 
problems with it.

So I think it's a waste of time to contact them *again*, unless the 
contact comes directly from somebody who RMS will actually listen to.

Accordingly, the natural solution for the FDL/invariant licence 
problems is to pull the manuals out of Debian.  But the maintainers 
simply won't do it.  That's a social problem.

So what exactly are we supposed to do here?

In the case of the Sun-RPC, someone has already stated that he is going 
to rewrite the code from scratch.  So, that seems sufficient progress to 
me, even if it's slow.

Again, what would you like us to *do* with those bugs?

--Nathanael