Re: packaging org-mode & worg

[Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@upsilon.cc>]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 01:30:00PM +0200, Giovanni Ridolfi wrote:
> [I opened a new thread, changed the subject, and 
> cc:ed Carsten and Mark that are having a
> similar thread: "contributing Debian build scripts"]

Thanks.

> Stefano, sorry to bother you again, but now I'm pretty sure I've *not*
> understood the *key point* of your request (that you have briefly
> mentioned before, but that I skipped, because it was unclear to me).

I didn't mean to create all this fuss, but I'll take the chance of these
questions of ours to give some guidelines that in general help package
maintainers in distributions.

> Could you, please, elaborate who are the distribution editors?  

Sorry for the convoluted term; with "distribution editors" I meant "the
people which maintain packages in distributions (like Debian, Fedora,
Suse, etc.)". Their job is usually to take what the original software
authors (which we call "upstream") release and ship it as packages for
the distribution users.

In general, distribution people expect to have all the stuff related to
an upstream software to be contained in a single tarball; there are
exceptions, but it is easier that way. What I was asking for was merely
to ship Worg stuff in the org-mode tarball. Once it is there, the
distribution people can decide what to do about that (one of: ship it in
the main package, ship it in a separate -doc package, ignore its
existence all together).

An extra advantage of having the doc together with the software is that
software comes with a license that, in most cases, can be assumed to
apply also to the documentation. In the case of worg indeed, I currently
can't find a LICENSE for the content in the Git repo; that would inhibit
most maintainers from packaging it as content without license is not
redistributable by default. This is probably not what you intended, but
it is a common scenario when stuff is distributed separately: it is
really easy to think about a license for a software, while it is easily
forgotten to do the same for the documentation.

The problem of syntax that you raised in a previous mail is of course a
valid one and not affected by the above discussion. I was naively
considering that there was a (trivial) way to convert Worg into info for
integration within the Emacs help system, but I've since then realized
that that is not necessarily the case.

Hope this explains,
Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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