No more emacs-snapshot on Debian sarge-backport? (answer: No)

(tags Emacs, Debian, linux distribution, document, license, failure)

(I wrote this before figuring out how easy it is to roll my own emacs-snapshot. Duh.)

This is news more than a month old, but it seems that the Debian binary package of Emacs "22-pretest" (more correctly known as the CVS Head "pretest") called "emacs-snapshot", is no longer available for Debian Sarge. Romain Francoise, the previous maintainer for emacs-snapshot in both Debian Unstable and Debian Sarge cites differences in opinion on the "GFDL problem" which is shockingly summarized as "GNU manuals are now considered non-free in Debian".

This leaves one back to compiling emacs CVS from the source. From a user perspective, it's harder to compile Emacs 22-pretest than it is to add a few lines to /etc/apt/source.list and aptitude install emacs-snapshot. I will miss this convenience. Should I be kicking myself for not saving the .deb packages? Why bother when it really not too difficult to compile it myself.

But let's get back to the "GFDL problem". This is a deeper issue than the quote above implies. According to "Draft Debian Position Statement about the GNU Free Documentation License(GFDL)", the GFDL is an unacceptable license for Debian documentation. According to this interpretation, the GFDL is incompatible with the GPL. For Debian to live up to its Social Contract, it is necessary to disallow any GFDL documents, which means stripping many documents from their software packages. Of course they are still available from the original sources, but not maintained by Debian. Here is the issue impacting KDE developers back in 2007/01.

However, on a practical level it inconveniences Debian users from learning about their software such as Emacs, unless they are knowledgable enough to select the "non-free" or "non-dfsg" documentation packages. Such is the price of being "free". That is assuming that the upstream package makers do not change their documentation licensing.

Remember that Debian's distribution of Firefox is now official maintained as "Ice Weasel"? It is for similar reasons.

Well, this is not really an informative post, because I haven't seen that the documentation is or is not lacking with Emacs on Debian Etch, despite the fact that I already installed it. VMware w00t. Sorry. It's just that I have to unload this crap post out of my queue.