Re: News about the macro archive

[Peter Simons]

Tom,

I think it is pretty impolite to reply to a private e-mail
with a Cc to a public mailing list without even asking.

Now that it has happened, though, I might as well respond on
the list too.

You wrote:

 > I've had 42 responses so far, out for about 60 that were
 > sent out.

That's more than I thought. I'm glad the support for
different licenses is there now, though, because it sure
looks like we won't reach 100%.


 >> @license AllPermissive

 > I've actually been putting

 > dnl @license
 > dnl   Copying and distribution of this file, with or without
 > dnl   modification, are permitted in any medium without
 > dnl   royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice
 > dnl   are preserved.

Please don't do that, it will break the formatter. Please
use:

  @license AllPermissive


 > The reason for this is (as you pointed out) some people
 > are using the macros directly from CVS, so we must ensure
 > that they receive complete licence information with each
 > file (i.e. either the all permissive statement or a more
 > verbose GPL with exception statement).

Yes, but editing the files manually isn't good enough. We
need license information in _all_ 340+ macros, so it has to
be generated by a tool. That's what my tool is doing, and I
will run it once I know all macros are properly assigned.
If you add the license in verbatim in addition to the
@license tag, then we will end up with the license _twice_
in the macro.

So please just use @license for now.


 > Also, I noticed that the all permissive licence refers to
 > a copyright statement, but currently there is no
 > copyright statement in the files.

This statement will also be generated automatically using
the list of @author tags as copyright holders.


 > Ideally it would be great for the average everyday user
 > to be able to grab the code from cvs, and when they run
 > make it would generate the docs for them.

Yes, that would be great, but this is a secondary concern
for me. The average everyday user can use the web site or
download the release archives. My focus is on providing the
archive, not on providing a solution that implements
archives. ;-)


 > What do you think if we do something based on gendocs.pl
 > [...]? Most users have perl installed (actually I think
 > automake is written in perl), so it would mean that most
 > users would be able to generate docs themselves.

I don't know. I have a pretty sophisticated software written
already. Rewriting that in yet-another-language doesn't
sound like an efficient use of resources to me. What the
Macro Archive really needs right now is not crazy HTML
generation software, it is people who are willing to
maintain the _content_. We have obsolete macros to mark, we
should convert to the ax_ prefix policy, we should
reevaluate the category assignments, etc. All this is much
more important, IMHO.

Peter