Free'ing documentation: How to include doc sources missing in the orig.tar.gz

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hello,

teTeX contains a couple of documentation files that are definitely
non-free (#345604) and need to be removed, but there are others that can
be "made free"[1].

In other words, either they are licensed under a DFSG-compliant license,
but the source is missing, or we manage to convince the authors to
relicense them (and get the sources).

I'm wondering what the correct way would be to make the source
available.  There are a couple of options:

1. Simply include a README file that tells users where the source for
   each document can be retrieved.

2. Collect all missing sources and release them as a separate source
   package, and informing about this in the original package.

3. Collect all missing sources and include them in the original source
   package. 

Naturally, 1 is less work for the teTeX maintainers than 2 and 3; the
advantage of 2 over 3 is that the diff.gz is not bloated by adding text
that is not in fact Debian-specific (but that's only a minor point,
since we can collect everything in one directory).

What do you think - would option 1 be acceptable?

And a related question: I understood that there's no need to recreate
documentation files that are included in the orig.tar.gz from their
sources, it's enough that the sources are present.  But now when the
sources were not present in the beginning and we only add them,

- Do we have to verify that the source actually can be "compiled" to a
  document?  (I guess yes)

- Do we have to verify that the generated document and the included
  document actually match?

  That would be hard manual work, at least in the case of
  LaTeX-generated files as most of ours are.



In case that you think one of the questions, or your answer, is more
appropriate to -legal, feel free to move there; but I think that these
are in fact rather technical issues.

TIA, Frank

[1] note that we produce the tetex-doc binary package with

Installed-Size: 64784

so this is not just one or two files...
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)