From: Joshua Rodman
Date: 01:02 on 11 Sep 2006
Subject: Debian and the GFDL and stupid packaging decisions
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.)
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