Sigh. It’s just about the last straw for me and debian-based systems.
I wanted to read about the texinfo format, so naturally I ran ‘info texinfo’, and all I got was a man page which told me to run ‘info texinfo’ to get the full documentation. Oh funny – GNU is full of recursive jokes but this is just silly. Ahh well off to try and install it. Hmm, no texinfo-doc package, huh? Just some non-free ‘info files’ which didn’t seem related to texinfo at all. Oh what? They ARE the documentation. WTF Is going on?
Ho hum. Ok, so i’m a bit late to the party – 2 and a bit years late – but really, these debian guys have lost the plot a bit – they’ve always had a ‘*BSD crowd’ feel about them and things like this just reinforce that impression. Maybe that’s why i’ve had so much trouble finding the documentation for just about everything I looked for.
Complete documentation is a core strength of Unix and by extension the GNU system. It is one of it’s main benefits over other so-called ‘operating systems’ like Windows. Without readily accessible man pages how can you learn to use the system? To write software? I learnt perl from the rather excellent man pages that at least used to exist – why buy a book which will be out of date quickly and is hard to search?
Documentation IS part of an application. To not install it by default is bad enough, to not install it on purpose for quite petty reasons is utterly atrocious.
A serious commitment to upholding the founding social contract is not a petty reason. Go fetch yourself some integrity.
It’s exactly the same issue that was had with the 4-clause BSD license. http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses
If you want Free documentation, I suggest that you appeal to the documentation authors to remove the stupid, pointless, and harmful aspects of the GFDL.
Are you sure you don’t mean “to choose a non-free license for your documentation is utterly atrocious”? The GFDL is, unfortunately, a massive fuck-up, and the apologetics in the link you gave don’t make it any better.
You are aware that your rant targets the completely wrong problem?
“apt-get install texinfo-doc-nonfree”?
Also: http://fragglet.livejournal.com/6944.html
I do rather agree with you, though. I used to be a big debian fan; I switched to Ubuntu almost immediately after it came out. Rather than the documentation issue, my beef is with the management of the project. If we’re lucky we get a stable release every three years from Debian, plus with their massive bureaucracy it seems they are incapable of putting things which are necessary for a modern Linux distribution into their default install.
*BSD people understand the value of documentation! :-)
apt-get install texinfo-doc-nonfree
there you go …
Another key strength is freedom of modification. When documentation is licensed in some way which makes this impractical (Stallman outright banned the XEmacs people from cribbing parts of the GNU Emacs manual for their own), you lose that freedom. Some people care if they don’t have to go cribbing through licenses before being able to do something as simple as distribute their changes to something.
– Chris
If you’d like Texinfo to have complete documentation, then your issue is with the GNU project — not Debian. Debian does not control the license Texinfo’s documentation is released under. In fact, Debian developers have been so kind as to re-write documentation for applications whenever they get the chance — such as the manpage for “tar”.
Ever thought of trying Foresight?
So you’re mad that you, a developer, didn’t type “apt-file search texinfo”?
BTW, here’s the output:
…
texinfo-doc-nonfree: /usr/share/info/texinfo-1.gz
texinfo-doc-nonfree: /usr/share/info/texinfo-2.gz
texinfo-doc-nonfree: /usr/share/info/texinfo-3.gz
texinfo-doc-nonfree: /usr/share/info/texinfo.gz
…
I’m sure there is a really nice easy way to install the docs like “apt-get install your-missing-docs” but I never found it. It’s annoying, especially when you don’t know what the package might be called, but it’s still not enough of a reason for me to stop using Debian.
Actually gNewSense probably has all the GFDL manuals, if you can put up with no flash and no 3D acceleration for your video card. :)