Re: [ELPA] New package c-intro-and-ref -- was Re: Proposal: Include C Manual from RMS in Emacs git, and/or release

[Xiyue Deng <manphiz@gmail.com>]

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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. ]]]
>
>   > > It would also make sense to make the Emacs manuals available for easy
>   > > download, as distributions like Debian do not include these by default.
>
> How about if we make ALL the GNU manuals available in one place
> as .deb packages, for the same of people with Debian-nased distros?
>
> What is the emacs-common-non-dfsg package?
>

(I'm not an official Debian Developer, but below are public knowledge in
the Debian community so hopefully I'm not giving incorrect information)

TL;DR: The Emacs documentation is under GFDL with an invariant section,
which is not considered compliant to Debian Free Software Guideline
(DFSG), so its documentation is split into a separate
emacs-common-non-dfsg[1] package and is only available in the "non-free"
section.

Longer story: According to one of Debian's General Resolutions[2], the
GNU Free Document License with an invariant section is considered too
restrictive and hence does not meet Debian's standards for free
software.  Therefore, documents under such licenses needs to be under
the "non-free" section, which is not enabled by default.  As a result,
many Emacs packages under GFDL with an invariant section that are
packaged in Debian have their documentation either removed or put in a
separate package in the "non-free" section.  Examples including Emacs[3]
(with emacs-common-non-dfsg split to the non-free section), compat[4],
dash[5], org-mode[6] (with org-mode-doc[7] split to the non-free
section), etc.  Note that their version numbers have "+dfsg" in it,
because the source packages included in Debian are modified by removing
the non-free part - documents.

As a quick overview for package sections: Debian packages are split into
several main sections: main, contrib, non-free, and recently
non-free-firmware.  "main" (and recently "non-free-firmware") is enabled
by default when installing Debian, and user can choose to enable
"contrib" and "non-free" later.  "non-free" section contains packages
that are under a license that is not DFSG-compliant (see [8] for more
detailed description), "contrib" is for packages that are DFSG-compliant
but depend on packages in the "non-free" section.  "non-free-firmware"[9]
is for firmware packages which are "non-free" but required for running
Debian in certain hardware, especially in recent hardware, and hence are
available during installation.

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
>
>
>

[1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/emacs-common-non-dfsg
[2] https://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001
[3] https://packages.debian.org/sid/emacs
[4] https://packages.debian.org/sid/elpa-compat
[5] https://packages.debian.org/sid/elpa-dash
[6] https://packages.debian.org/sid/elpa-org
[7] https://packages.debian.org/sid/org-mode-doc
[8] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#the-non-free-archive-area
[9] https://www.debian.org/vote/2022/vote_003

-- 
Regards,
Xiyue Deng

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