Re: doc-get idea
Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
> On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 12:35:16PM +0200, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
>> It strikes me, however, that a generic tool for downloading and
>> installing and upgrading various kinds of documents (including RFCs)
>> might be useful. It would make it less necessary to include packages of
>> the documents in Debian, which might be a win regardless of whether the
>> packages are free or not. It is not clear that documents not related to
>> software packaged in Debian is best distributed as a .deb. On the other
>> hand, it's not clear it is a bad idea, either.
> And what about the offline people ? Sure this situation is becoming less
> all the time, but it still may be present from a large group of people
> who could benefit directly from debian. Will these become second class
> users ?
A doc-get package (which is what I was more trying to get at in my other
message) would be useful regardless, since a lot of people like to
maintain local mirrors of freely available documentation. Off-line users
aren't second-class citizens just because Debian includes wget. :)
Whether to also include the .debs is another question, but I do have to
wonder why those off-line users don't just pick up a cheap CD of free
documents. I believe there are a fair number of those out there, very
inexpensive. It's not clear to me that the Debian project is the best way
of distributing arbitrary freely available documents, particularly ones
with restrictive modification licenses. They don't particularly *hurt*
anything in Debian, apart from the licensing issues, but apart from
documentation packages corresponding to packages in Debian, it is a bit of
a drift away from what Debian is particularly good at.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: