On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 10:34:51AM -0700, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > You are being denied by RMS. He controls the copyright, the SC has > no legal say, and he's stubborn as hell. > > When presented with weak arguments, then yes he will be stubborn but > rightly so. > > I don't see what the problem is with two manuals, from a users > perspective I actually prefer that and doing cross referencing between > manuals in texinfo is easy.
OK, let's say Don Knuth decides he wants to spend his retirement contributing to GNU. RMS is effectively saying that "literate programming" is banned from the GNU project and Knuth can just go away if he doesn't like it (and yes, requiring GFDL for documentation and GPL for code is equivalent to banning literate programming). This is an anti-software-freedom argument, an attempt by one man to impose his personal taste. For a class library, documentation generators are really the only reasonable way to provide a maintainable manual. You need to make sure that every inheritance relationship is described correctly, and you need to make sure that, as interfaces change, they are described consistently and accurately. The best way to achieve that is to auto-generate the information. Sure, as a *user* it works equally well for you if the maintainers have worked three times as hard to do by hand what could be done by computer, but there's a high cost.
