>>>>> "Jeff" == Jeff Licquia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Jeff> On Wed, 2002-07-17 at 01:31, Frank Mittelbach wrote: >> Branden Robinson writes: > Perhaps the LaTeX community should >> appoint a spokesman to the Debian > Project so that we do not >> get contradictory statements about what is > acceptable? >> >> Branden, pardon me, but i think this is funny. seems that you >> think the LaTeX community needs as spokesman which is the very >> thing that I think debian needs. Jeff> I'm curious. From my perspective, the Debian people seem Jeff> not to have been contradicting themselves so far; I But we do seem to be contradicting our actions and unclear on the implications of DFSG 4. I think DFSG 4 means that you can require renaming or patch files of the sources. It also seems that you can require renaming of the distributions. What Debian finds unacceptable is the assertion that we must break the TeX or LaTeX API (hey you said it was a language) in order to make some changes. I.E. if we find a bug in article.cls, it's not OK to rename that file because then \documentclass{article} will either fail or get the old file rather than our changed version. The argument is that in practice we cannot follow DFSG 3 because we cannot change the software and maintain API compatibility with existing documents if we fix bugs. The TeX license is OK because it mandates what we call the program, but does not say anything about the API. Even if the binary is called uglytex, it's still easy for me to run it over .tex files. If those files use macros defined in plain.tex, those macrso can (at our option) continue to work in uglytex. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]