Re: What RMS says about standards
On Thu, 20 Aug 1998, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 1998 at 06:28:14PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > Since you are ignoring all the discussion that has gone on
> > before, you obviously have far more cogent arguments than have been
> > advanced here before. I am eager to hear them.
>
> Web archives are painful to get through in lynx and I've had very serious
> mail problems trying to deal with using earthlink's mail services in place
> of my own. I've lost a lot of messages on the subject. I have been looking
> for summaries. I haven't seen any labelled as such and haven't stumbled
> across any not so labelled yet. Perhaps one is in order?
I have summarised once or twice. Manoj has once or twice.
*please* go and read the archives. I'm not aware of them being painful in
lynx. In fact, I just checked. They seem extremely easy to read in lynx.
Marcus, Manoj, Drake and I [to name maybe the noisiest 4, maybe not - also
Raul, Richard, etc., etc.] have all thought very hard about this issue,
and written many thousands of words each on the subject. It is a courtesy
to us to read them before attempting to explain your own thoughts on the
issues.
>
> > Documentation for software
> > Technical documentation describes the behaviour, usage, and
> > configuration details about a specific piece of code. It may also
> > be instructions about how to modify or extend the software.
> > (Users manuals, etc) Examples include the GIMP Users Manual, the
> > GCC Internals guide, any source-code written with "literate
> > programming" tools, etc.
>
> This really should be with the package, when possible. If necessary, a case
> by case analysis may be needed, but not for most things. If some portion of
> documentation for software (ie the official perl FAQ thingie) is not
> modifiable, there's probably a good reason for it. No reason to call it
> non-free or even take it out of main.
The perl FAQ being non-free is stupid. IMO, of course. Documentation
should always be free. I think RMS's original email of the subject is in
the archives of this thread.
Jules
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