emacs-snapshot orphaned
About this time last year one of the more interesting (from a user point of
view)
Debian General
Resolution was passed and today I feel its effects more-so than any other
time.
At the heart of the matter is the
Free Software
Foundation's vs Debian's position on
the
GFDL,
particularly the `invariant sections' clause. An `invariant section' might be
the front and rear covers of the user manual that perhaps contains the authors
name and the publisher. The FSF maintains that modifying these sections isn't a
socially useful activity and might misrepresent the authors. Debian feels
documentation is essentially like software in this respect and a user should
have the right to change anything they see fit.
For my part I am not happy to see documentation moved into Debian's non-free
repository, already the autoconf and automake manuals live there, but as long
as I still depend on a closed source driver for my video card, I will still
have non-free enabled. (I would like to find a video card that has a 3D capable
open source driver, but as of yet know of no such card.)
As much as I love Debian I feel they did the wrong thing here, and these issues
still warrant further examination, despite the seemingly
endless
flame-wars discussions on the relevant mailing lists.
The point some people make is that if you rip the manual out of Emacs and
package it separately, simply enabling non-free will solve your
problem. However this is not good for people who refuse to run non-free
software and are left with an application that is crippled without its
documentation. (Emacs without its manual would undoubtedly be crippled).
I bring all this up because for almost 2 years
now,
Romain Francoise has maintained a
snapshot of the latest emacs CVS release. Being able to run Emacs22 on my
Debian Sarge server is really a great thing, and having it packaged for me,
with almost weekly updates is even better, so I was somewhat saddened to learn
he has orphaned the package, along
with
Bongo, the really
cool little Emacs media player.
Both of these packages I use every day, day in and day out so I will have to
either hope another Debian developer picks up the packages or checkout and
regularly build the software from source on my desktop, laptop and server which
might prove to be a tad tedious.
I hope Romain doesn't leave Debian entirely as he is one of those developers
that responds to bug reports, listens to users and has provided me with some of
my favorite software.