Re: Proposal: Include C Manual from RMS in Emacs git, and/or release

["Björn Bidar" <bjorn.bidar@thaodan.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > FWIW, I don't think this (IMO very useful and installed on my
>   > machines) manual belongs to Emacs.  It should be a separate manual.
>
> As a general design principle, it doesn't seem to make sense to
> include all GNU manuals in the Emacs distribution merely because they
> are useful manuals.  The idea was to relese them separately and have
> them installed separately into a combined info tree.
>
> Why is that not working?  What needs to be changed in some GNU/Linux
> distros?

The issues the others mentioned mainly the lack of acceptance of the
format and for sometime the possibility to find info manual manly due
the first problem.

Some projects switched to documentation systems which don't provide
anything but HTML or PDF such as e.g. Doxygen or those where the info
output is available but fragile and usually not enabled due problem one.

In the instance of the this specific manual it's just that it's one
specific document which isn't distributed along other software which is
unusual but also that it doesn't get much exposure I think.

The last issue is that the license make it impossible to be distributed
for some namely those which are Debian based but not solely those.

Related: I package the manual for RPM based distribution below:
https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:Thaodan:Documentation/c-intro-and-ref

I will submit the manual to openSUSE unless some other issue comes up.