I agree with Manoj that it is important to put those standards that are immutable in the hands of users and developers. What if we widened the definition of contrib/ to allow immutable documents? There's no reason they have to be packages in main/, contrib/ is just as good for the purposes of our users. We can still say "Document ABC-413b is on the Official CD". It's not modifiable by Debian, we haven't had the opportunity to edit it to fit our needs, so perhaps we shouldn't claim it as part of Debian (in main/). It still belongs to the upstream authors, they have (contrib/)uted it to us and allow us to distribute it any way we see fit. I'm not suggesting we allow immutable programs into contrib/. That could potentially affect our system security and robustness. Reformatting and typos aren't very important for non-code. Translations would be nice, but the translation is never going to be the standard, so one route would be to make translations more of a general commentary on the standard rather than a literal translation. This avoids the entire copyright issue, and in no way confuses the translation with the original document. I don't think we'll have many volunteers to translate standards documents anyway. Can you really think of anything more boring? I think most people would want to be well paid to do precise translations of technical documents. What about data that isn't directly human readable, but also isn't code? I'm thinking about imagery, sound clips, schematics, etc. I could see all of these being classified as "documents" as well. And just to confuse matters: postscript is a programming language, but it isn't very editable. Any document policy that distinguishes between "documents" and "code" needs to decide what postscript is. Microsoft Word 6 format is also a programming language, but I don't think we need to worry about it. The many macro-capable formats out there are probably a good argument against having a separate document policy. Hmm. Imagine an immutable macro-virus-infested standards document..
-- Dr. Drake Diedrich, Research Officer - Computing, (02)6279-8302 John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University 0200 Replies to other than [EMAIL PROTECTED] will be routed off-planet
