Re: hello 2.3.91 pretest

[Karl Berry]

Hi Eric,

    Neither the Automake manual nor the GNU Coding Standards
    (standards.texi) mention whether COPYING.DOC is recommended
    practice.

I'd expect any info to be in maintain.texi rather than standards.texi.
(Not that there's anything there, either.)

I asked rms about it some time ago.  The answer is no, COPYING.DOC is
not recommended practice.  The reason is that the recommended way to use
the FDL is to include fdl.texi should be @include-d in the manual in its
entirety.  Therefore there is no reason to have a separate plain text
version -- there is nothing referring to it, as there is with the GPL.
There is no particular harm in it, though, so I don't see a problem with
Automake's behavior.

If the distribution doesn't contain any FDL-covered documentation, then
I see no reason to include it in any format.  (Along those same lines,
we don't include the LGPL in GPL-only distributions.)

If a distribution includes many small manuals, all covered by the FDL
(e.g., Emacs), the FDL has provisions to avoid duplicating the FDL
source every time.

I guess it would be good to write something about this in
maintain.texi.  I'll try to get to that and run it by rms.

Thanks,
karl