MJ Ray wote:
[The state of the GCC manpage] probably means that the GCC maintainers have misused the FDL by accident, similar to the GDB maintainers in the past.
[...]
please research whether the GCC maintainers know that using the FDL for a manpage has problems. Some GNU projects use info files, so maybe the manpage in non-free was not made by them - in which case, it says nothing about the GNU FDL fiasco. If it is their man page, then it means yet another mature GNU project has been confused by the FDL.
GCC's manpages are mechanically generated from its info files. We asked the FSF how to apply the GFDL and were told that the *entire collection of manpages* counted as the Work, so it was okay to put the Invariant Sections in separate manpages. See http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-11/msg00311.html et seq. I'm not a fan of the GFDL, and I'm very happy to see Debian finally throwing all of the FSF's documentation into non-free where it belongs, but I don't think you need to worry about GFDL manpages being undistributable (at least, as long as they come from FSF projects; one could easily have a copyright holder not buy the above reasoning). zw