On Thu, Aug 20, 1998 at 07:38:32PM +0100, Jules Bean wrote: > > > Since you are ignoring all the discussion that has gone on > > > before, you obviously have far more cogent arguments than have been > > > advanced here before. I am eager to hear them. > > > > Web archives are painful to get through in lynx and I've had very serious > > mail problems trying to deal with using earthlink's mail services in place > > of my own. I've lost a lot of messages on the subject. I have been looking > > for summaries. I haven't seen any labelled as such and haven't stumbled > > across any not so labelled yet. Perhaps one is in order? > > I have summarised once or twice. Manoj has once or twice. Manoj has since given me a summary of arguments for verbatim and I have more or less decided that for my part in it, he's got good arguments. Please find my replies. > *please* go and read the archives. I'm not aware of them being painful in > lynx. In fact, I just checked. They seem extremely easy to read in lynx. An offer has been made to send me relevant messages I missed and I've accepted the offer for anything Manoj didn't cover in his summary to me, which were really convincing arguments. I still have issues about licenses and splitting apart packages because they contain docs which are deemed non-free. > Marcus, Manoj, Drake and I [to name maybe the noisiest 4, maybe not - also > Raul, Richard, etc., etc.] have all thought very hard about this issue, > and written many thousands of words each on the subject. It is a courtesy > to us to read them before attempting to explain your own thoughts on the > issues. Which is why the archives are so hard to read through. Having missed the messages first times around, reading EVERY message now would take an extreme amount of time without some good summaries and the like. As I said, I didn't stumble across any prior to the summary arguments of what should and would go into verbatim. > > This really should be with the package, when possible. If necessary, a case > > by case analysis may be needed, but not for most things. If some portion of > > documentation for software (ie the official perl FAQ thingie) is not > > modifiable, there's probably a good reason for it. No reason to call it > > non-free or even take it out of main. > > The perl FAQ being non-free is stupid. IMO, of course. Documentation > should always be free. I think RMS's original email of the subject is in > the archives of this thread. It is, yes. But do you tear apart the perl packages to pull it out? Do you consider perl non-free for it? Or is it better left as it stands now? I think in that instance it's best to leave it as is, IMO.
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