Re: Source package containing HTML-only form of texinfo doc

[Thomas Weber <thomas.weber.mail@gmail.com>]

Hi, 

Am Donnerstag, 5. Juli 2007 16:02:13 schrieb fourmond@debian.org:

> > Am I misunderstanding what you're saying? octave2.9-htmldoc contains
> > this exact documentation that upstream is distributing.
>
>   Yes, but built from source, and the source of octave2.9-htmldoc contains
> the texinfo source. qtoctave doesn't, which is a breach of the GPL: you
> must be able to distribute the preferred form of modification, and not
> having it in the upstream sources - even when we know where they come from
> - makes it delicate for us to distribute it.
>
>   In other words, any users should be able to do
>
> apt-get source qtoctave
>
> and modify the documentation, which is not possible as the texinfo source
> is missing.

I'm one of Octave's Debian maintainers. 

The problematic part is that qtoctave is primarly a Windows application. I 
don't think they even have any sort of code for generating the HTML files 
from the Texinfo sources, so even including the texinfo files would still be 
a violation.

Maybe they should just update the documentation and use the HTML files from 
[1]. I think the files there have a more liberal license.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/

	Thomas