Sven LUTHER wrote:
On Sat, Aug 24, 2002 at 08:56:17PM +0800, Yang Shouxun wrote:Hi, can anybody enlighten me why ocaml-doc is non-free in Debian distribution?Because it fails many points of the DFSG, in particular, you have no right to modify it. That is how the authors want it, and so we can only distribute it in non-free, which is okay (altough i guess other documentation in debian also have this same problem and shouldbe moved out of main into non-free, i have not checked though). Also, anyway, we don't have the original source of the libs, only the produced stuff, so this is another point making it non-free. There are other stuff that are in the ocaml-doc package, or could be, that are non-free also, like the examples and other such.
I see. While it's their freedom to do so (I don't want to question that), it's a little bit strange that Inria developers choose to keep the ocaml-doc separate from the distribution and not release the source of the ocaml-doc.
I guess it's useful to the user upgrading if a diff between the present and the last version of ocaml-doc can be provided.
Interestingly, vrms does not list it as a non-free package.What is vrms ?
vrms is a package in Debian that checks no-free packages in the distribution, to satisfy RMS's complaints, thus the name, virtual RMS.
Anyway, much discution went into the move of ocaml-doc from main to non-free, you can look at the archives of debian-ocaml-maint@lists.debian.org to get an idea of some of them.
Thanks!