Re: New DFSG-compliant emacs packages
Le jeudi 26 octobre 2006 19:10, vous avez écrit :
> > Newbies don't use Emacs because it's not for them.
>
> Of course, this is complete nonsense. _Everybody_ who _ever_ uses
> Emacs passes through a newbie phase.
These days, I wouldn't encourage people to try Emacs.
It's not nonsense, it's my opinion. You don't share it. Fair enough.
> > Experienced users know Emacs enough to get along without its
> > documentation,
>
> Again, this is utter nonsense. I am an active Emacs developer and
> maintainer of AUCTeX, and such can hardly be called inexperienced, and
> I frequently need the documentation.
Currently the lisp reference is not even provided by Emacs. And I bet
you can use Emacs for everyday's tasks without it's user guide.
> > and when they need it they know where to find it.
>
> And another piece of nonsense. Being an experienced User of Emacs
> does not imply being experienced with the Debian packaging system and
> the outpours of the DFSG guidelines.
Nothing to do with it. They can even read the manual from gnu.org.
> > Again, the split was made to make things clear toward licensing.
>
> The purpose of Debian is to provide free software, not to provide a
> lecture about it. If Emacs (as created, provided and named by the
> FSF) can't be provided in Debian main according to Debians guidelines,
> it should get moved as whole to non-free.
It _does_ provide a lecture of it: when people have to grab packages from
non-free, they get de facto warned about what is problematic toward licensing.
Emacs is free software, it's documentation is not.
> There is no sense in providing only a partly functional part in main.
> And it is misleading to not prominently point this out, in startup
> message, and in the name of the package (emacs21-without-docs or
> emacs21-only-dfsg or similar). Otherwise, people will reasonably
> expect that the package contains a packaging/compilation of Emacs in
> the extent delivered by the FSF.
No, they won't expect that because package descriptions as well as
changelogs and copyright files are informative enough for them to
understand.
--
Jérôme Marant
Reply to: