I fear that one problem here is that I regard "Debian" as comprising only the "main" archive.
Some people seem to have, in the back of their heads, that relabelling the emacs manual as non-free is a mere bookkeeping change of no major consequence, that moving it from main to non-free is a mere issue of labelling. Since Debian is only main, this is a proposal to remove the Emacs and GCC manuals from Debian. Nobody is really aware of any other important texts that have significant invariant sections than these two manuals, IIRC.
