Re: distributing precompiled binaries
* Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> [090328 23:46]:
> And this has all been discussed before.
Obviously not often enough for you.
> > Also, a PDF is a program for a certain type of interpreter.
>
> A PDF as a program is its own source. You're talking about the preferred
> format for modification of *documentation*, not a program. There's no
> reason to expect that two different versions of mumble2pdf are going to
> output two *programs* that resemble one another in the slightest
This is no different to a compiled binary. It's just another
computer-readable translation, which a human can also treat as such,
such a very inconvenient one. And while different compilations of a
program are in practise very similar, the only thing one can expect is
that they produce binary that do the same thing (and even that is often
not true).
> - only that they output the same documentation.
I concur the problem is less severe with documentation than with
programs, as translating to text and reformating is often not that big
a loss for documentation. But I think in most cases only a .pdf is still to
hard to change to call it free.
Bernhard R. Link
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