Re: Consequences of moving Emacs Manuals to non-free

[Jérôme Marant <jmarant@free.fr>]

Sven Joachim <sven_joachim@web.de> writes:

> Jérôme Marant wrote:
>
>> The Project has decided that invariant sections were unacceptable.
>> You could help us by talking to GNU people and asking them to remove
>> those invariant sections from their documentation.
>
> Well, this may stand a chance with some GNU maintainers, but with RMS?!
> I guess I'd be wasting my time, since he has clearly stated his
> opinions about that matter.

You're plain right.

>> Newbies usually don't use Emacs. Experienced users are smart enough
>> to add non-free to their source.list APT file, and grab docs from there.
>> Were are talking about the info documentation.
>>
>>
>> I think that docs are going to be moved to an emacs-docs package and
>> emacs21 will suggest it. I don't think it should go to contrib.
>
> Yeah, after all, the social contract merely states:
>
>       We will never make the system require the use
>       of a non-free component.
>
> Now I realize what that means: "The system" does not require the
> non-free documentation, although one could argue that its users and
> developers probably will require it.  Quite sophisticated.

Perhaps grabbing documentation from non-free will be a minor inconvenience
for many users. We shall see.

>> Does C-h C-p points to the documentation (info documentation) or to
>> the DOC file ?
>
> Neither, it points to the file THE-GNU-PROJECT in Emacs' data-directory.
> That file is unmodifiable and has to be removed from main.  Nothing
> really bad should happen though, only some "no such file or directory"
> error.  Be prepared for some bug reports.

Of course. A patch will probably fix this by showing some note.

-- 
Jérôme Marant