Re: copyright notices on Info docs

[Dave Love]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

> I don't see much reason to put the copying permission inside the top
> node.  It is legally valid anyway, and people who want to copy the
> materials can find it.
>
> Is there a reason why this is important?

I'd have thought the online docs should display the copying terms like
programs.  (It definitely seems odd for the manual to go to the
trouble of showing you the GFDL as `the licence for this
documentation' without telling you the extra conditions on the
sections.)  I actually thought that was GNU policy, but at least the
manuals should be consistent.  The Texinfo release notes say:

  *** IMPORTANT NEWS FOR ALL AUTHORS OF TEXINFO MANUALS ***
  
  As of version 4.2, Texinfo has a new command @copying to define the
  copyright and copying permissions for a manual.  It's important to
  switch to using it as soon as possible (as in your next release),
  because the historical method of doing copyright permissions using
  @ifinfo failed to output copyright information in the HTML (or XML)
  formats.  The manual has detailed explanations and examples.  For
  convenience, here's a url to one of the relevant sections:
    http://texinfo.org/manual/Document-Permissions.html