Re: What to do when the LaTeX sources are missing, but an XML equivalent was rewritten from scratch ?

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> writes:

> Argg, yes, here we are again. What matters to me is that a user can use
> the INFORMATION in the document, i.e. the actual source and use it in
> case he makes a derived work.
>
> And it matters to me that people can get optimal typographic quality.
>
> So either we have to distribute crippled versions of many documents,
> crippled only in the sense that yes, all the information/text is there,
> but the layout and design is crippled. Or we do not distribute them at
> all.
>
> That is a very bad option, sorry.
>
> Maybe it is that I am one of the few who CARE for design and typographic
> quality.
>
> Do the DFSG apply to design???

I'm personally going to bow out here, since I think this is now a
discussion about what rules we should have rather than how to apply them,
and I try not to have this discussion.  I don't disagree with you, but am
not sure that I agree with you either.  I think the tradeoffs are very
hard.  But we had a GR a while back which, at least in my opinion, is
fairly unambiguous in its results (particularly after the subsequent GRs),
so policy-wise that was the decision of the project.

I would certainly carefully consider a new GR to see if I thought it was
an improvement, but short of that, this discussion tends to be very
frustrating for all involved.

I hate the way fonts are licensed and how few of them are under free
software licenses.  I think it's one of the biggest flaws and shortcomings
of free software right now.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>