Re: GNU M4 1.4.5 released

[Eric Blake]

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Hi Gary, Santiago,

According to Gary V. Vaughan on 7/17/2006 7:30 PM:
>> 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?

How is a license that permits only verbatim copies more free than one that
explicitly states there are no invariant sections?  I honestly don't
understand debian's policy.

>>>
>>> [ I assume the answer is "no", but I think it is better to be sure ].
> 
> Wasn't the 1.4.4 manual released under GFDL-1.1?  Did Debian
> ship the 1.4.4 manual?

No, 1.4.4 was shipped under a verbatim-only license, as quoted by
Santiago.  GFDL wasn't introduced in the m4 CVS repository until CVS head,
which listed GFDL 1.1 instead of 1.2.

I merely copied exactly what autoconf 2.60 used in their manual.  I'm not
sure I see what the problem is, since debian is shipping autoconf 2.59a-3
(the precurser to 2.60), with the exact same documentation license wording.

> 
> I'm sorry I didn't notice earlier;  I think the problem is this:
> 
> $ diff -u -D '1 week ago' doc/m4.texinfo
> [[snip]]
> -or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
> -with the no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts,
> -and with no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license is included in
> [[snip]]
> +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.''

No, that patch snippet is from CVS head, not branch-1_4.  And even that
change (rev 1.3) was in Nov 2000, which post-dates release was 1.4o (Jan
2000), which is the last release I have found anywhere of CVS head.  NEWS
talks about 1.4q in 2001, but I have not found a tarball of that, and
there is no CVS label for that release.

> 
> If Santiago agrees with me, I think we should undo that part of
> the change, and release 1.4.6 relatively soon.

Or I could change the disclaimer to say there is no front-cover and no
back-cover text, if that is better.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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