Debian documentation
Back in March, Debian
DFSG decided
that the
GNU Free
Documentation License violates it's guidelines because of the
invariant sections,
DRM and "Transparent Copies"
issues. As I understand it, which is to say, at its most basic
level, the GFDL says that you can restrict certain parts of your
documentation from being altered, improved, removed or otherwise
changed. This, led to a
General Resolution
that decided that documentation that contains invariant sections is
no longer considered Free by Debians' definition.
Now where it gets cloudy for me is that some maintainers have
chosen to repackage the documentation and move that package into
the non-free repository, for example gcc-4.1 now ships its
documentation in a separate package, gcc-4.1-doc. Are the
maintainers under any obligation to do this? Can they just remove
the documentation entirely? Personally, if I have to add non-free
sources to install documentation I will, I have no problem with
what Debian did, and even the horrifically long and tedious
discussions on debian-legal and debian-devel just serve to
illustrate the degree to which the developers care about free-ness,
so again no problem there, but I worry about documentation being
harder to get or find for end users like myself.
It would be nice to set this as a flag in my apt preferences for
example and whenever I install software with non-free
documentation, it automatically installs the documentation for
me.
While we are on the subject, I would also like the debian-installer
to ask me, after determining that I am single user, sending mail to
and from my ISP, if I would like to add the ISP's mail-server
address's, and my password and set the appropriate alias in
/etc/email-addresses. That would take care of exim for users, like
me, who fear its configuration files.
One last tip, if you write an rsync script to that syncs your music
directory with your external usb hard-drive, please make sure your
script actually checks that the usb drive is mounted before copying
90GB or so of data onto your 20GB root partition :-)