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Re: GFDL/GPL issues
Richard Kenner wrote:
> Could part of the problem here be that RMS's view on "documentation" is
> that it's meant to be a creative process, somewhat akin to writing a book,
> and that mechanically creating "documentation" will produce something of
> much lower quality than what's done by hand? Back when he and I spoke
> regularly, I know that he cared a lot about the "literary" quality of the
> documentation and I think that part of this might be due to a "why would
> you want to do that anyway?" position on automaticaly-generated stuff.
Yes, that is part of his thinking. And, yes, we can split our manuals
up into GPL and GFDL pieces, and in some cases that will work fine.
But, documentation of constraints (important to users for writing inline
assembly), or documentation of command-line options (important to all
users), or documentation of built-in functions (important to users to
understand the dialect of C we support) are all things that belong in
the manual, not in separate GPL documents.
FSF policy is making it impossible for us to do something useful to
users, that poses no real risk to the FSF's objectives (manuals were
under the GPL for ages without the world ending), and which GCC's
competitors can do. That's a suboptimal policy.
--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713