On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 07:13, Fedor Zuev wrote: > Removing of secondary section from manual can't be count nor > as improvement, nor as adaptation of manual.
It is, by definition[0], off-topic. Therefore, as any good editor[1] will tell you, it would be an improvement to remove it. [0] Read the GFDL; every Secondary Section is defined as being off-topic. [1] The human kind, who is responsible for making sure that the resulting work is coherent and complete. It is painfully obvious that the so-called "Free Software" community could *desperately* use the services of many competent editors of this sort. The emacs manual, in particular, is filled with off-topic material, begins with a bunch of legalese that a) belongs at the end, and b) describes in great detail how that emacs as a whole is licensed under a self-incompatible license (GPL+GFDL, since it claims right there that the documentation is part of the editor[2]), contains advertisements (for other systems, no less), and contains a couple of embarrassingly juvenile comments about some of the operating systems it runs on. All in all, an embarrassment to "Free Software" -- and that's all just in the first page of the index! I'm not an editor by trade, nor am I willing to work on something where I perceive the license to be the height of hypocrisy *and* the license is written in such a way as to ensure that I cannot succeed in my task. I do, however, recognize that the GFDL is a very real limitation on the improvements that can be made to this manual. [2] The electronic kind. -- Stephen Ryan Debian Linux 3.0 Technology Coordinator Center for Educational Outcomes at Dartmouth College
