[ Disclaimer: I supposedly have CVS access, last I was told, and I ]
[ certainly do most of the work to ensure that GCC will work on the ]
[ proto-port to NetBSD; apart from that, and reading both debian-gcc ]
[ and debian-legal, you probably have to ask Matthias Klose for a final ]
[ answer, since he initially replied to the GFDL bug. ]
On Mon, Sep 01, 2003 at 04:54:21PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Steve Langasek wrote (in
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/debian-legal-200309/msg00007.html):
> >Does this mean that the gcc maintainers don't agree with this list's
> >interpretation of the GFDL, or that they don't regard this as a high
> >priority between now and the release?
> I believe that the maintainers want to have a document they can point to when
> ignorant users say "WHY ISN'T THE GCC MANUAL IN MAIN? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?"
This seems to be the primary issue. Removing the manuals isn't all that
hard (okay, maybe not trivial, but not *hard*), but it will result in
the sound of a million developers crying out, and then suddenly being
silenced... er, okay, maybe not. But *I* certainly would like to have a
canonical answer to give folks (like the proposed GFDL FAQ) when they come
beating on the lists, railing against fate and Debian that the manuals have
vanished to the abyss of non-free.
> Perhaps they're also waiting for the consensus on manuals with no Invariant
> Sections and no Cover Texts, which took longer to come to consensus. (The
> majority opinion now is that the GFDL is not a free license even then, due to
> the overly broad "technical measures" clause among other things.)
One which I share, though I believe the actual statement by Matthias was
(paraphrased) "Call me when y'all make up your minds". I'd say the survey
more or less accomplished demonstrating this, for the moment. I'm not sure
if that suffices for Matthias, or whether he wants a statement from the
(RM/DPL/ftpmaster/High Pooba) sanctioning it.
> The GCC mantainers can correct me if I'm wrong or verify that I'm right which
> is why I've cross-posted this to debian-gcc.
See the disclaimer at the beginning of this message. :)
> Could some Debian developer who is a debian-legal regular perhaps write such
> a document and put in on some Debian website? Somewhere on people.debian.org
> would quite likely satisfy the desire for something 'official'. You can lift
> mine if you like. :-) Perhaps even a nice summarizing post on debian-legal
> would do.
>
> >Does the patch have negative side
> >effects that leave the maintainers reluctant to apply it (such as
> >leaving sarge without any gcc manual at all, even in non-free)?
> Quite likely. Probably this could be fixed with little effort by uploading a
> "non-free-gcc" source package though...
Certainly it would require splitting things out and juggling a bunch of
things to get things to get it all sorted out. Not impossible, but I don't
blame Matthias for wanting a clear ruling on it before going to that much
effort.
A patch won't suffice, since the *sources* for main must be Free, and thus,
the entire manual set must be moved to a separate source package, to be
maintained in Debian.
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU NetBSD/i386 porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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