Re: Free documents using non-free fonts - can they be in main?

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:
> - There's no automated way to reproduce the documentation exactly as the
>   author wants it, and once we would establish one, there would be no
>   way to detect whether a new upstream version changed that.
> 
>   The reason for this is that building (La)TeX documentation
> 
>   * depends on the right number and order of commands to be executed,
>     which one has to find by trial and error (it's very rare that
>     authors upload Makefiles, since usually they aren't needed much)
> 
>   * depends on settings in local configuration files, which may differ
>     from package author to package author and from version to version.
> 
>   So the author of a LaTeX package generates the documentation, looks at
>   it, adjusts their local configuration if necessary, and uploads the
>   package sources  and the documentation PDF (CTAN requires this AFAIK),
>   but not local configuration files.  I assume the CTAN admins would
>   reject uploads that include configuration files like ltxdoc.cfg,
>   because it would make CTAN's search facilities unusable for that
>   file. 
> 
>   As a consequence, you can't be sure to get the same document by simply
>   running pdflatex over the source file.

This is an excellent reason for why the documentation *should* be
rebuilt.  How do you know that you can make a reasonable document
unless you build it yourself?  How do you fix errors in the document?
As Bas wrote, all binaries must be built from source.  This is one of
many reasons why.

Also, everything in orig.tar.gz must be DFSG free.  Even if you just
throw the file away and rebuild it.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu