Re: arevert-xtra.texi xref gremlin

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> IIRC they also recently voted to consider GFDL'd manuals as free at
> the condition that they do not add any extra clause.

And any front and back covers.  It was somewhat unclear what it would
have meant to the Debian AUCTeX maintainer if we had put the standard
FSF front and back cover texts on (he likely would have tried muddling
through).  But in this particular case (the manual had been licensed
differently before), Richard let us do without.  I think this is
basically what the simplified GFDL does: not have invariant sections
and, even more, not even have provisions for them.

With Emacs, however, the situation is already established and it has
the GNU Manifesto as an invariant section under the GFDL.  I doubt
this is going to change anytime soon.

In my opinion, rating the two standard sentences on front and back
covers for FSF as "non-free" is completely silly.  There has been no
Debian vote on those particular texts, though, just on the complete
absence of such texts making the GFDL being considered free.

> In any case, the problem of Debian's multi-version support with info
> files is unrelated to the GFDL.  And we can blame Debian all we
> want, but I don't think we have many alternatives to offer.  Info is
> just currently not very good at dealing with such problems.

Installing several different versions of software at once?  Certainly.
Other software can't do this without conflicts.  I think it was a
mistake by Debian to think they could allow such a contraption for
Emacs, when it fails for much simpler systems.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum