Re: HEADS UP: GCC manual soon to be printed

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Thu, 15 May 2003, Lisa M. Opus Goldstein wrote:

> I will wait until the end of May for the final changes to be added,
> and then put the book into production.  Any remaining typos or
> typsetting issues found along the way will be sent upstream to you
> guys.

Two and a half years ago <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2000-11/msg00753.html>
RMS said (in response to some questions I asked about the copyright
assignment forms):

#     Does assign.future also cover changes to the GCC manual?
#
# I asked our lawyer about this a month ago, and that is when I wrote
# the text in maintain.texi about the subject.  In the case of the GCC
# manual, since it is published separately as a book, we should get
# separate papers for the manual.
#
# It would have been a good idea for me to have asked about this in the
# past.  I wish I had asked him earlier.

and Gerald replied, with response from RMS
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2000-11/msg00872.html>:

#     Ouch. Does that mean that before the next edition of the book someone
#     will have to contact all who have contributed to the manual?
#
# It would be a good idea to do this, yes.  Isn't it safe to assume,
# though, that only contributors to GCC's code have contributed to the
# manual?  That would make a finite set of people to ask, and they could
# be asked easily enough by sending the same message text to each of
# them.

I'm not aware of anything having been done since then [1] about getting
separate forms for the manual signed by contributors.  Was it subsequently
concluded that it wasn't in fact necessary to do this?

(I think the set of people with assignments covering GCC numbered about
600 at that time; there will be more since then; I don't know whether
anything was done though about the suggestion of producing a unified
assignment form for future contributors, covering both the code and the
manual.)

[1] I have asked about whether there was any progress at least once in the
mean time, <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2002-03/msg01343.html>, not
just now just before the new edition of the manual.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk