Re: FDL

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Ali Abdin wrote:

> Somebody switched the FDL from an Appendix to an Article - Is this
> intentional? (uggh, I still need to integrate the patches from jfleck).
> 
> Note: if you 'include' an article inside an article (or an article inside a
> book) - well i have no clue what the results would be (i.e. its unsupported)

There are two ways we will use the FDL:

1) ** Online docs **
By "online docs" I mean documents which are shipped with GNOME and which
show up in your help browser.  All of these docs will link to the FDL as
an <article>.  This way the user can always have a reliable link from
every doc to the FDL without actually shipping the FDL with every
document.  We could do the same thing as an entity, but this is
distracting to the reader since the FDL shows up in all the TOC's,
indexes, word searches, etc. for every document which is undesirable.  To
make this work right the FDL (fdl.sgml), along with other key docs like
the GPL and possibly some entities, will ship with gnome-core and be found
in CVS in gnome-core/core-docs.  Each package must also ship with the FDL
in the package, which we will do by placing the doc in a file called
COPYING.DOCS and install similar to the COPYING file which generally
contains the GPL.

2) ** Stand-alone docs ** 
By "stand-alone docs" I mean anything which doesn't get shipped as
described above.  This would primarily include documents we post on the
web. Because every document must either contain the FDL or ship with a
copy of the FDL, these documents should actually contain the FDL as an
appendix.  Thus, we will have a second copy of the FDL which is formatted
as an <appendix> so that people can incorporate it into these documents.  
The differences between the two versions is only a couple lines.

We will probably keep these files:
	<article> version	gnome-core/core-docs/fdl.sgml
	<appendix> version	gnome-docu/fdl.sgml

Or should we use a different filename for the two? If so, please suggest
names.

It will be a few more days until we get this finished.  Presumably we will
do something very similar with the GPL.

BTW: Eric Baudais deserves the credit for doing all the markup of the FDL 
and (soon) GPL.

Dan