Bug#774932: Bug#774931: Trying to find the licenses for the alt.sysadmin.recovery man page collection
>>> Gah, this anonymous submitter is annoying. His claim that this "is
>>> practically impossible" is yet to be proved as I'm trying to prove the
>>> opposite.
>>
>> I am not anonymous.
>
> Just a first name and an anonymous remailer is more or less anonymous
> for me.
It isn't an anonymous remailer; this is my actual email address - you
can send Bitmessages to it as well. :-)
Thanks for pointing out about me only giving my first name - I didn't
realise this. I'll need to change my reportbug configuration.
> RMS declaring that something doesn't need to be free is weird.
Yeah, he seems to be upset with Debian, because he says that we
distribute non-free software.
>> I even tried making a phone call to someone after looking up their
>> name in the white pages.
>
> Thanks! I actually would only try that in my own country...
Same. After looking at a wayback machine copy of Nikolai Kingsley's
homepage, I discovered he lived in Victoria, just like me.
Unfortunately, I got an answering machine message. :)
>> The reason that I filed the RM request was that the RC bug on
>> funny-manpages was left open for several hundred days, with no
>> action.
>
> Despite they are different authors and nobody had tried to contact
> them before? Sorry, from my PoV this is clearly not the same.
You're probably right, but at the time I made the decision because the
maintainer of asr-manpages was the same as the maintainer of funny-manpages.
fwiw, I saw that John Guthrie's email bounced. Have you considered
contacting the math department of the University of Pennsylvania to see
if they know where he is now?
>> Since it seemed that nobody cared about this issue with
>> funny-manpages, I saw no reason to assume that anyone would care
>> about it with asr-manpages.
>
> I didn't try it with funny-manpages as there were more or less no
> authors listed in there. But in asr-manpages, most authors were listed
> and it was clear that the original postings can be found in the usenet
> group alt.sysadmin.recovery. For me that's a huge difference and the
> reason why I started the effort for asr-manpages, but not for
> funny-manpages.
Okay, now I see why you'd want to help fix asr-manpages but not
funny-manpages. Having the list of authors' names and email addresses is
a big advantage over not having them.
>> Now that you are making an effort to fix it, that's great. I *want*
>> asr-manpages to be in Debian. I just don't think that you are likely to
>> get permission from all, or even most, of the authors, and especially
>> not in time for the jessie release.
>
> Not anymore after the package has been removed earlier than needed,
> no. IMHO, there was a small chance before the removal. *sigh*
*sigh*. Hopefully in Debian 9.
> (I can see that result of the effort around funny-manpages can be
> demotivating and frustrating. But someone taking away the chance to
> get something fixed in time is demotivating and frustrating, too. So
> please be less impatient when you file an RM bug next time.)
Okay, I will. Just confirming, in future would it be okay to file an RM
bug against a package with an RC bug that hasn't seen activity in a
year, provided I express my intentions in the report and give the
maintainer a week to respond?
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