On 2003-09-27, Barak Pearlmutter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Based on long-standing Debian tradition and practice, this [removing
> non-modifiable texts] is decidedly and demonstrably not the case!
> Don and others were perhaps writing in haste.
It is long-standing tradition; however, whether it should continue is
another question. I haven't seen many people offering a principled
defense of the practice.
I would be very surprised if any DFSG-free text were removed from a
Debian package.
> To my knowledge Debian has not only never removed a snippet from the
> source we distribute, but includes such snippets in the binaries,
> typically in ...-doc.deb. One example of this is GNU Emacs, which
> includes a bunch of such snippets, all of which are included---right
> now---in /usr/share/emacs/21.2/etc/. All of them are removable: sex.6
> (which is of questionable taste),
Please see the discussion Bug #154043. sex.6 has no copyright
statement, and so can reasonably be supposed to be covered under the
copyright of the whole package.
> GNU, CENSORSHIP (which is dated into
> such irrelevance that its inclusion is arguably embarrassing),
> LINUX-GNU (whose first sentence misleadingly reads "The GNU project
> started 12 years ago"), ...
Already filed as bug #207932, marked as sarge-ignore (per the release
manager's stated policy). If you want to offer a principled reason
why this is not a bug, I'm eager to be convinced (although IANADD, so
you don't need to convince me).
> COOKIES (whose relevance, copyright status,
> and humor value is unclear),
Same situation as sex.6.
Peace,
Dylan
