Re: Pages of the Tramp package.

[Michael Albinus <Michael.Albinus@alcatel.de>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

>> - Tramp has different syntax for Emacs and XEmacs. I don't like it,
>>   but that's the status. Therefore, there are TWO web pages for
>>   Tramp, each linked to the other.
>
> Two _web_ pages or two _info_ pages?

Two _web_ pages. One _info_ page, but the syntax described differs wrt
the Emacs flavor detected during Tramp configure.

> There is nothing to be said against having Tramp web pages out of
> Emacs.  Since tramp is integrated with Emacs, one should also take a
> look at how to integrate documentation to it.  But as long as tramp
> is also a separate project, the focus of interest it has as a
> separate project should certainly also be documented separately.

>From tramp.texi uploaded to Emacs CVS one could generate a web page,
of course. But it has less contents, and should be used only for
references from Emacs web pages.

> What I was originally asking was why tramp is not a GNU project,
> which is surprising when you see it also as a part of Emacs and (c)
> FSF.  There would be some valid answers:

In fact I can guess the answer only because moving Tramp to savannah
happened before I have been involved.

> a) tramp explicitly condones nonfree software.  I don't see this here
> (and nonfree is not the same as non-GNU, or non-GPL).

It doesn't AFAIK.

> b) there are parts of tramp that are problematic to be distributed by
> the FSF, perhaps related to encryption or something.  But then the
> issue is not GNU or non-GNU, but the distribution by the FSF.  If we
> have a problem in that area (which I certainly don't hope), nothing
> will help except ripping tramp from Emacs and all servers in the
> U.S., and have it copyrighted and distributed by someone outside of
> U.S.A. and the FSF.

Here I'm not sure because I don't know regulations of used
packages. Tramp uses ssh, samba, ftp as external packages. None of them
should be regulated. There's no encryption, just encoding/decoding
(mimencode, uuencode) which shouldn't be a problem.

The most likely answer is "it just happened".

Best regards, Michael.