Re: GNAT documentation in Debian

["Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>]

> Well -- I do hate products that are not self contained. The fact that
> online source suddenly went dead in the past, might have contributed
> to that, so I have to grab everything now (manually, instead of just
> putting the debian CD on the shelf), to be able to work with it in the
> years to come.

OK, then you can copy the documentation I referred to to your hard
drive. It's just a bunch of static HTML, info or text files - no CSS,
no JavaScript, no dynamic anything. I agree that providing the doc as
part of Debian would be nice, but I stand by my claim that it's not a
very big deal; just a minor annoyance which you can solve with little
trouble.

> Furthermore, the idea with non-free is, that there is some kind of
> dependency from other peoples whim or rights, that might make the
> non-free thing/package go away in the future, become unusable (i.e. we
> can't change it to reflect the real situation) and so on. So
> documentation being in 'non-free' really says "there might not be
> accurate documentation in future".

Yes, that's true, and that's why Debian decided by way of vote that
any GFDL'd documentation containing invariant sections, front-cover
texts or back-cover texts was "non-free". In the particular case of
the GNAT docs (or the ASIS doc, which is in non-free for the same
reason), I personally think it is ridiculous that one-line front-cover
or back-cover texts should make the whole document non-free, but
Debian cannot change that. Only the copyright holders can. Hence
Florian's very welcome offer to help.

--
Ludovic Brenta.