Re: bug#19299: 25.0.50; "Contributing" button in *About GNU Emacs* no longer works

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

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. ]]]
>
>   > You mean, we shouldn't be concerned that this information will not be
>   > available to users of a popular platform?
>
> I don't know exactly what practical question is at issue here,

The issue is the "contributing" link from the Emacs Help | About Emacs
buffer.

In 24.4, that link brings up the file etc/CONTRIBUTE, which is installed
by the Emacs binary install.

We've moved .../etc/CONTRIBUTE to .../CONTRIBUTE, on the theory that
this would make it more visible, forgetting about the About page.

We've also put developer information in there, forgetting about the
original intent of the file (which was to encourage users to contribute
bug reports and patches to Emacs).

In order to resolve these issues, I proposed moving the non-developer
information into the Emacs manual (info "(emacs)Contributing"), and
changing the link on the About page to point to that.

I then asked whether we could rely on the Emacs manual being installed,
and someone pointed out that on Debian (and possibly derived
distributions), it takes extra user steps to install the Emacs manual,
due to the free/non-free policy issue. 


However, I now see that one of the other links in About already points
to the manual: Ordering Manuals

So we could just follow that precedent.


-- 
-- Stephe