On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 09:12:58PM +0000, M. Drew Streib wrote: > 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? Could invariants be > allowed more freely if policy dictated that anything more than a paragraph > or so be kept in a separate file? This is one possibility I proposed to RMS. Essentially, I proposed that all Invariant Sections had to be placed in debian/copyright, and that any duplicates of his Invariant text in the "actual" documentation would be modifiable. RMS was uncomfortable with this, fearing that people might change (or omit?) this Invariant text in the place where it showed up[1]. However, the Invariant Sections would continue to exist in unmolested form in debian/copyright, and all Debian users know where to find the copyright file for a given package. A couple of points about this proposal: 1) It would pretty much forbid Invariant Sections that consist of, or contain, anything but plain text. Is this a problem? 2) I'd *still* want a quantitative barrier on the size of debian/copyright in this case. The size of this barrier I'm willing to leave wide open to negotiation, and perhaps use the GNU Emacs Manual as a yardstick, if it has the most Invariant Sections of any of the GNU Manuals. Note that this proposal gets into implementation details, like "debian/copyright", which I've been trying to avoid, but feel free to read "designated, standardized location" for this instead. [1] I think it's interesting that RMS and I have complementary paranoid fears. He is afraid that Debian package maintainers will not be reasonable, and molest the "modifiable" version of Invariant texts, and I'm afraid that GNU FDL licensors will be unreasonable and pile tons of Invariant crap onto their manuals that any sane person would want to excise. -- G. Branden Robinson | The noble soul has reverence for Debian GNU/Linux | itself. branden@debian.org | -- Friedrich Nietzsche http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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