GFDL/GPL issues

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Wed, 26 May 2010, Matthias Klose wrote:

> there is another issue with the manual pages.  Debian considers GFDL licensed
> files with invariant sections and/or cover texts as non-free.  You may agree
> or disagree with this, but the outcome is that Debian has to ship the gcc
> documentation and the manual pages in its non-free section.  The issue was
> raised with the FSF some years ago, but issues with the GFDL seem to be low
> priority within the FSF (Mako may correct me).  It would be nice to know if
> the files used to generate the manual pages (gcc/doc/invoke.texi,
> gcc/fortran/gfortran.texi, gcc/java/gcj.texi) could be dual-licensed as well,
> so that is possible to provide basic documentation in Debian as well.

Just as Joern has worked on putting target hook information in one place, 
if we can get suitable permission from the FSF it should allow putting the 
Texinfo descriptions of individual options in the GPL (plus whatever GFDL 
permission wording the FSF approves) .opt files (which I think would be 
good for similar reasons - making it more likely that people write and 
update the documentation).  This is not all the documentation that goes in 
the manpages, but a large proportion of it.  I would hope that the 
permission will not require us to go back to the FSF for each individual 
case where we wish to do something like that.

I have no plans to work on that, but do intend to make it so that all the 
options are actually in the .opt files in the first place - at present 
options that are purely handled by the gcc.c driver do not appear there 
(and many such options are undocumented).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com