Re: GNU M4 1.4.5 released

[Eric Blake]

> On Sun, 16 Jul 2006, Eric Blake wrote:
> 
> > * Many documentation improvements.  Also, the manual is now distributed
> >   under FDL 1.2, rather than a stricter verbatim-only license.
> 
> This is a little bit unfortunate for me as the Debian packager for m4,
> since the GNU FDL is considered suitable for Debian main only if there
> are not invariant sections (which is not the case for m4).

Really?  Quoting from m4.texinfo:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the @acronym{GNU} Free Documentation License,
Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software
Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with the Front-Cover texts
being ``A @acronym{GNU} Manual,'' and with the Back-Cover Texts as in
(a) below.  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled
address@hidden Free Documentation License.''

What are the invariant sections you are worried about?  I am
personally agreeable to anything to allow debian to ship m4-1.4.5
(or the soon forthcoming 1.4.6, since problems have been identified
in 1.4.5); but it is also up to Gary.

> 
> The previous license had this:
> 
> > Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
> > manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire
> > resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission
> > notice identical to this one.
> 
> which was good enough for main. Is there any hope to see m4 manual
> to be dual-licensed under both GNU FDL and the previous license?
> 
> [ I assume the answer is "no", but I think it is better to be sure ].
> 
> Thanks.

-- 
Eric Blake