Re: (end of) Development and documentation in Debian

Tyler Smith wrote:

This has been getting increasingly aggravating for me, as I find more and more of the documentation is either stowed out of sight in non-free, or has actually been put in some sort of package purgatory while someone decides what to do with it (ie. the elisp docs, which are currently not in etch, although I did find them in unstable).

<SNIP>

From an advocacy point of view it might be worth considering what message we're sending to users if they have to use the non-free repos just to get basic documentation. Should make-doc really be in the same category as proprietary drivers?

Bluefish, which I recently posted about, is a good example. I DO have non-free in my sources.list, but I can not find ANY documentation for it. The README that came with it says that the manual should be in the docs/ subdirectory. Unfortunately, this subdirectory does not seem to exist. I can get the manual online at http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/manual/, but if the upstream version changes and the docs change with it then this will no longer match what is on my Debian/Stable box. There appears to be no what to get the docs resident on my box to match the installed version of the software.

--
Marc Shapiro

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
What?! Look, somebody's got to have some damn perspective around here.
Boom. Sooner or later ... boom!

- Susan Ivanova: B5 - Grail


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