Re: Futile bug reports?

[Bill Richter]

       Great!  To repeat, I fully support the policy of not discussing
       on GNU newsgroups the competitors of the GNU manuals.  But to
       me, this is a "support the FSF financially" issue, and not a
       "free books" issue.

   Our policy is that this list should not be used to publicize *any*
   non-free manuals, or any non-free software.  It makes no difference
   whether there is a free replacement (or, if there is one, who
   distributes it).

Richard, can you clarify the meaning of the word manual?  Is any book
a manual?

Let's say someone posts on g.e.h. that they can't understand some
"Lispy kinds of things" in the Emacs Lisp reference manual.  I'll
respond, you've got to learn some Lisp first.  I suggest you go read
an intro Scheme book, such as SICP.   Are you objecting to this?   Are
you saying that SICP is a non-free manual?

By "Lispy kinds of things" I'd include my grinding-axe, the discussion
of pointers in the Emacs Lisp reference manual.  Just for
clarification (not to continue our argument), let's say someone posts
on g.e.h. that they can't understand the meaning of this sentence in
the Emacs Lisp info node "Cons Cell Type":

     A note to C programmers: in Lisp, we do not distinguish between
     "holding" a value and "pointing to" the value, because pointers
     in Lisp are implicit.

That's when I'll say "go read SICP."  I don't think this violates your
policy against publicizing non-free manuals, since IMO SICP is a book,
not a manual: a book of the sort that the GNU project isn't writing.

Now maybe that will change.  Maybe as Guile progresses, the GNU
project will produce an intro Scheme book, and then maybe I'd have to
reconsider whether it would be acceptable to publicize SICP on g.e.h.
I'm I'd be inclined to publicize the Guile "manual" instead.

And I don't even know what the software part of this means:

   Our policy is that this list should not be used to publicize *any*
   non-free manuals, or any non-free software.

There have been zillions of bug reports posted on g.e.b. about one
proprietary OS or another, SunOS, AIX, SGI...  You could argue that
that's publicizing non-free software.

In fact, I've used that argument.  A friend of mine is thinking of
buying a Mac and running Emacs on it, and I've told him, I never see
any Mac bug reports on g.e.b., so I don't think it's very well
supported.  Get a Linux-GNU box instead.