Re: PROPOSED: interpretive guidelines regarding DFSG 3, modifiability, and invariant text

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit "M. Drew Streib" <dtype@dtype.org>

> Would it be a thought to distinguish between the different types of
> documentation? Should a man page (designed to be strictly
> technical/reference) be any different than files in the doc
> directory?

There would be good reasons to use stricter standard for man pages,
but I think it would be more natural to let the stricter standards
apply directly to what *kind* of data you find there, than to how
the text is licenced. As such the distinction would be better made
in Debian Policy (assuming it isn't already there; I'm not too
familiar with that document). Of course the kind of text expected
in manpages is, by clear consensus here on -legal, the kind of
documentation that *must* be modifiable.

But on the whole I'd say that if it's documentation that's technically
important enough that Debian wants to distribute it (in the doc
directory or whereever), it is important enough to need the right
to free modifications.

> Could invariants be allowed more freely if policy dictated that
> anything more than a paragraph or so be kept in a separate file?

I think that would still keep the Gnu manuals out in the cold, at
least in their preferred format as info files (a "separate file"
requirement that accepts the numbered foo.info.NNN parts as really
separate files would not solve any real problem in need of fixing).
And in that case we might as well take the fundamentalist approach.

-- 
Henning Makholm                    "What the hedgehog sang is not evidence."