On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 8:48 PM, Robert Dewar <de...@adacore.com> wrote: > Joe Buck wrote: > >> So one way to move forward is to effectively have two manuals, one >> containing traditional user-written text (GFDL), the other containing >> generated text (GPL). If you print it out as a book, the generated >> part would just appear as an appendix to the manual, it's "mere >> aggregation". > > Does *anyone* print documentation "out as a book", this seems to me > to be a completely obsolete concept. We used to print GNAT manuals > for our customers, and ship them out in fancy boxes, and they looked > nice, but were in reality useless, since they got so quickly outdated. > > We still format everything so that it can be printed out as books, but > I doubt anyone does it, we certainly don't.
So perhaps the solution is to only make the manual available as separate, linked HTML pages from now on? The HTML pages would exist under different licenses. There is nothing against pointing from GFDL-licensed web pages to GPL-ed web pages, right? So we could have a GFDL "wrapper" manual, and parts of the manual generated from GPL code as separate pages. There are interesting problems (generating the index, for example, and a small maintenance problem for the links between parts of the manual under different license), but it would work around the license problems. Feels like reductio ad absurdum, but that's really sort-of the point... Ciao! Steven
