Re: GNAT documentation in Debian

[Markus E Leypold <development-2006-8ecbb5cc8aREMOVETHIS@ANDTHATm-e-leypold.de>]

"Ludovic Brenta" <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

>> 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.

I agree, that it is only a minor annoyance _in that single
instance_. Unfortunately minor annoyances of that kind happen far too
often. Also even and especially as a stand alone system, my potato
CDs are now worthless (or at least diminished in worth), since many
packages refer to documentation or add ons in the internet that are
now not there any more. My thinks that should be food for thought.

Also I didn't want to say that this costs me so much time now: I only
wanted to oppose the message "and we (the free maintainers) don't care
for non free docs, wether they are packaged or so" (I'm interpreting
your word here). I only wanted to point out the fallacy in that.

>> 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. 

Since it is always possible to add a page that reads "extensively
modified by XYZ project to reflect the changes done WTR to ...", this
is indeed ridiculous.

> Only the copyright holders can. Hence Florian's very welcome offer
> to help.

Indeed. I'd be happy to see that change.

Regards -- Markus