Please do not Cc me on mailing list posts.
What does it take to get this damn message across to people? Do you
assume that "No Junk Mail" signs have an "(Unless it's too much effort)"
rider or something? If not, why do you assume M-F-T headers and the list
guidelines in the developers-reference do? What the hell is the deal?
On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 06:31:04PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> My proposed guidelines, which don't pretend to the legal precision
> that Branden prizes, refer to whether the amount of text is a large
> chunk.
I don't really think that helps. The worst case scenario is something like
having every manpage (or infopage) come up with a different free software
manifesto of dubious worth that's never allowed to be removed from the
document; not today, not tomorrow, not when the original author dies,
and probably not even x years after the author's death if the documents
maintained, and x ever becomes fixed again.
Is that the sort of environment -- where you can't customise that
particular feature of your environment -- really reminscent of the sort
of freedoms we espouse? I don't think it is, personally.
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > What about a rant that goes the other way, about
> > how the GPL sucks? What about one that talks about why "free software"
> > beats "open source" any day? How about vice-versa? How about one that,
> > instead of talking about the need for free documentation, talks about
> > the need for better quality control/assurance in free software?
> Well, saying the GPL sucks is, generally, contrary to the Debian
> Projects goals. Debian is essentially neutral on "free software"
> v. "open source".
We're neutral about it, but, unlike the FSF, we're willing to discuss the
GPL's flaws, and we're happy to encourage people to use other licenses
if they're better. I'm quite sure you've seen that sort of thing happen on
this list.
> Debian is in favor of quality control and assurance
> technologies.
Of course we are. Now envisage a different essay about this in every
manpage you open up. Envisage this five years from now, when half the
essays are out of date, and some are completely and utterly proven to be
wrong, but we're not allowed to remove them, and the author is no longer
interested in the app and manpage s/he hacked up way back in the day.
> > How about we use doc-debian for this? Put all the political screeds that
> > are really interesting and famous and historically valuable and so on
> > in that package, and then only let those documents appear in invariant
> > sections.
Which has the following properties:
* we judge whether an invariant section is okay based on the
length and content of both the invariant text, and all the other
invariant text in the distribution too
* we judge it based on its own merits, and its relevance to
the userbase as a whole -- so an invariant rant about how
much CVS sucks in the aegis package wouldn't be allowed;
but the GNU Manifesto and the Free Docs rant probably would;
and the GDB doc wouldn't make it in, because it's invariant
sections are stupid, even though it's probably a really good
almost-free manual
* we limit the total amount of invariant text in the distro quite
substantially -- probably to not much more than a dozen or so
such texts.
Also, note that the invariant "distribution" section could still cause the
emacs manually to be considered non-free. It's not clear to me that that
should get a similar exemption as the GPL/GFSD invariant sections should.
> The intention of FDL invariant sections is to piggyback political
> commentary on manuals, predicated on the assumption that the political
> commentary is "not too much" and "not enough to worry about" (more or
> less a paraphrase RMS's words). What many (including me) are worried
> about is that something quite different is going on, or could be: a
> big manual is being hijacked to carry a political message, and (for
> various reasons) it makes various people uncomfortable.
>
> So instead of going along with the statement "the political thing is
> just a small bit, not worth worrying about", let's say "it's a great
> deal worth worrying about; we don't think it impacts freeness, but it
> does warrant placement in a special 'political' category".
If we're going to move the document around, it seems better just to put
it in non-free. Having to `apt-get install debian-political' to get at
(eg) the emacs manual, doesn't seem like a real service to users.
It also doesn't seem to offer any reasonable way to limit the number of
stupid political rants that get forever tied to debian documentation:
if there are a bunch, -political just gets split. With the doc-debian
approach, every political piece that gets included has to really impress
the doc-debian maintainer, which most aren't going to, but which, I would
personally imagine, the GNU Manifesto and the Free Software needs Free
Documentation essay probably will.
(The doc-debian approach is essentially the "make an exception for the
FSF" approach. It still might be better to just put *all* this stupid
kinda-free nonsense into non-free)
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
"Security here. Yes, maam. Yes. Groucho glasses. Yes, we're on it.
C'mon, guys. Somebody gave an aardvark a nose-cut: somebody who
can't deal with deconstructionist humor. Code Blue."
-- Mike Hoye,
see http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/armadillos.txt
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