Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes: > On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 11:14:04AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > Quite right. I think we should look at the statement, and decide on > > that basis whether we want to carry it. > > So, if I write a manpage for, say, mutt, and include an essay about > how the GPL is a much better licenses than the BSD thing because I > don't think enough people understand that, should Debian accept it or > not? We mightn't have a problem with the screed, but if it takes up half > the man page it could be awkward. What if it only takes up 5% of the > totals docs, though?
My proposed guidelines, which don't pretend to the legal precision that Branden prizes, refer to whether the amount of text is a large chunk. > What about a rant that goes the other way, about > how the GPL sucks? What about one that talks about why "free software" > beats "open source" any day? How about vice-versa? How about one that, > instead of talking about the need for free documentation, talks about > the need for better quality control/assurance in free software? Well, saying the GPL sucks is, generally, contrary to the Debian Projects goals. Debian is essentially neutral on "free software" v. "open source". Debian is in favor of quality control and assurance technologies. > How about we use doc-debian for this? Put all the political screeds that > are really interesting and famous and historically valuable and so on > in that package, and then only let those documents appear in invariant > sections. > > Another problem with the FDL: you can't rip out a single invariant section > from a docco and publish it on its own, you have to take all of them. Ah, here's a clever idea. Well, I think it's clever: Create a new package in the main archive. It contains invariant text, among other things. FDL manuals (or others) that have invariant sections just get put in doc-debian. The intention of FDL invariant sections is to piggyback political commentary on manuals, predicated on the assumption that the political commentary is "not too much" and "not enough to worry about" (more or less a paraphrase RMS's words). What many (including me) are worried about is that something quite different is going on, or could be: a big manual is being hijacked to carry a political message, and (for various reasons) it makes various people uncomfortable. So instead of going along with the statement "the political thing is just a small bit, not worth worrying about", let's say "it's a great deal worth worrying about; we don't think it impacts freeness, but it does warrant placement in a special 'political' category". So let's call this new package "debian-political". It has whatever political messages Debian has chosen to put in its archive. It goes in main; if it gets too big, we can split it into parts. Of course, we would not print just anything in debian-political: if a political message is greatly offensive to Debian, we would not want to carry it. The right place for the emacs manual is then in the debian-political package. This reverses the slight-of-hand that RMS wants to try. Instead of letting him declare "this isn't much, don't worry about it", we would say "oh no, politics is so important that having any (invariantly) in a manual completely dominates its character; if you want to hijack, you've done it!" The manual then goes in debian-political. I insist that debian-political would still belong in main, but it might perhaps be a good idea to prohibit other main packages from depending on it; they would be required to only use "suggests". Thomas
