[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2006/09/11]
Debian has decided that documents under the GFDL with so-called "invariant sections" are non-free. This means that these documents have sections which are you not legally allowed to modify. In a sense this practice enables users of GFDL documents to refuse to pass freedoms on to sub-licensees. One could imagine a practical scenario where such documents become successively hidebound and unusable. Ironically, it seems to go against some of the GNU ideology of freedom. I think the GNU folks have sort made a mockery of themselves with this, but I don't care that much. However, Debian has a policy of shipping only free as in freedom components, and has decided that they should remove this non-free documentation from their distribution. The result: jrodman@Skonnos:~ >man gcc man: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz is a dangling symlink No manual entry for gcc See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available. This is pretty impressive. Not only do I not get the documentation, I don't get any sort of reasonable result. I don't even get an error that the manpage is missing. What I get is a _missing symlink_. jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls -l /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz lrwxrwxrwx [...] /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz -> gcc-4.1.1.gz jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.1.1.gz ls: /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.1.1.gz: No such file or directory You'd think this means I forgot to install something, but that would rely on the people packaging this stuff not screwing up. So there's some kind of pointer to the currently installed version of gcc which gets set up. I guess it picked the best option, eh? I mean it's not like the documentation for gcc is available in some other form: jrodman@Skonnos:~ >ls /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-* /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-3.3.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/gcc-4.0.1.gz Oh, I guess I'm wrong: there's completely reasonable documentation sitting right there. But hey, it's not like I'd want to read any of those documents. What I really want is a glaring error, which makes it seem like my system is misconfigured. And hey, I suppose it _is_ misconfigured, by Debian. Just to be clear, Debian does manage to make things like Adobe Acrobat and Macromedia (Adobe) Flash available via reasonable channels. They go into a repository of packages called "non-free". I suppose completely proprietary software systems with lock-in capability are more touchable than slightly problematic licenses for the standard free software compiler. Great priorities! (Yes I understand this situation may be temporary, but it's been this way for a couple months now. Great way to leave your users completely in the lurch! Oh that's right, if you're not running stable, you dont' exist.)
Generated at 13:01 on 13 Sep 2006 by mariachi 0.52