Following Richard Stallman's email (and his first one on this subject), and also because future version of gNewSense will be based upon Debian, we need to make Free Documentation rejected by Debian available for gNewSense. See also gNewSense bug reports: http://bugs.gnewsense.org/Bugs/00339 and https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?28596.
Contents
Introduction
Debian decided to reject documentation under the GFDL because of:
- invariant sections: Debian considers there should never be invariant section in Free Documentation,
- transparent copies: Debian considers Free Documentation should be available in whatever format is convenient,
DRM: Debian considers Free Documentation might be encrypted and copied on DRM-protected media.
More information on those problems are available on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL#Criticism and http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/Position_Statement.xhtml.
List of Free Documentation rejected by Debian
Free Documentation rejected by debian includes:
GNU: Autoconf, Binutils, Bison, Emacs, Gawk, Gcc, Gdb, GLIBC, Guile, Make, Texinfo
Links to those packages on Debian website:
http://packages.debian.org/autoconf-doc (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/bison-doc (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/emacs23-common-non-dfsg (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/gawk-doc (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/gcc-doc (in contrib),
http://packages.debian.org/gdb-doc (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/glibc-doc-reference (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/guile-1.8-doc-non-dfsg (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/make-doc (in non-free),
http://packages.debian.org/texinfo-doc-nonfree (in non-free).
Action to be taken
Original Documentation List
Here is a list of documentation for current stable versions of GNU programs, note that gNewSense does not necessarily include latest version of GNU programs.
Automake: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/,
Binutils: http://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.20/binutils/index.html,
Other GNU software documentation can be found within the http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html page.
GNU documentation package
The gnu-doc package contains all documentation listed above. The current version for gNewSense can be found at http://christophe.jarry.ouvaton.org/gnu-linux/gnewsense/.
Download it. Then install it in the terminal with:
sudo dpkg -i gnu-doc_*_all.deb
Please report any problem to our gnewsense-dev mailing list.
Notes:
- Most of these programs make their documentation available in *.info* files inside the source code of those programs.
- Some programs require their documentation to be converted from texi to info (emacs, gnat manuals in GCC, glibc, texinfo):
./configure make info -I some/directory