[tex-live] your eqexam package

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Le 09/07/2010 12:25, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) a écrit :
> 
> 
> T T wrote:
>> Oh, please Phil, don't make it harder than it is.  The source is not some
>> mythical animal no one has ever seen.  If you use OOWriter to produce the
>> PDF, then the .odt file is the source.  If you would hand-craft that PDF,
>> then the PDF is the source.  I don't think there is any ambiguity here (at
>> least I don't see it).
> 
> I'm not trying to "make it harder than it is"

I'm sorry, and please don't take it as a personal attack (it isn't meant to be
one), but I think you are :-)

Let me explain: neither Don nor Ulrike claimed there is no source to their
documents. It is clear to everyone here what the source to their document is,
and that it is not published. So, discussing in full generality what a source
is, is completely besides the point. And since such topics are bound spawn a hot
discussion, it is sort of "making it harder than it needs to be".

> I'm trying to point out that
> the "source" for a document is an extraordinarily hard thing to define,

For the record, not that much. A possible definition is "the preferred form for
editing by the author".

> Don Story and Ulrike Fisher's work is clearly of interest and benefit to the
> TeX community

Sure.

> if they prefer to offer only a final PDF rather than their
> own personal sources for that PDF, then that should (IMHO) be more than
> sufficient to allow the inclusion of their work in TeX Live.
> 
We (our policy) disagrees.

A short argument: if for some reason they disappear from the TeX community at
some point and become unreachable (which I obviously don't wish, but experience
proves such things happen), it will be very hard to take over maintenance of
their packages, since the documentation will have to be rewritten basically from
scratch.

But I'd like to avoid going through the whole standard list of arguments for
free software advocacy... So, let me just repeat what I said in another message:
if you understand why we value free software, then you may understand why we
value free documentation.

Manuel.