Koma-Script doc/source files installed with doc/source disabled

[Frank Mittelbach]

  Phil

> Yes, licencing requirements, whilst clearly necessary and acceptable for 
> proprietary software, are a complete and utter pain in the @rse in the 
> open-source world — I have never thought otherwise.  The sooner they are 
> abolished for free-as-in-libre software the better.

there are supposedly good doctors for such pain :-)

but to your point, to require that your work is *distributed* and 
provided to others with its documentation is more than legal and not 
just for proprietary software but very much so for free software. It is 
a pain in *** for developers if their work gets crippled and then they 
get a lot of unnecessary questions and can't even point to 
documentation, because it got dropped.

So I think we are mixing up two things here

  - what are distribution requirements (and the license for doing so)
  - what is Max allowed on his on personal PC

Max can of course delete all kind of source and documentation there but 
that doesn't means that TL is allowed to distribute it to him  only a 
fraction from a work

In fact, LPPL (which is the majority license here) is quite clear on 
that: you have to distribute the whole work not a crippled version so it 
is not just KOMA.

LPPL give you an out (intended mainly for things like embeded system 
etc) but on the whole I'm with Markus  that at least user documentation 
should never be dropped from a distribution unless there are 
overwhelming technical reasons.

So on the whole I think even offering a switch to only receive barebone 
dropping both source + documentation is bad and should not be provided.
I could live with a switch dropping source but I want to be able to tell 
user, see

   texdoc usrguide

or

   texdoc array

or what have you


There is not only a right for the user to have crippled works on their 
machine (you or Max can do so by deleting the doc directories)  but 
there is a right for the developer to make you do that consciously and 
not by having a distribution doing that for you and making you do it 
without even really noticing that you are shooting yourself in the foot


my 2 cents
frank