[cl-debian] cl-rfc2109: requesting comments

[Luca Capello]

Hello all!

Please Cc: me, I'm not subscribed to the list.  Moreover, please keep at
least the bug entry cc:ed, so people don't need to search in other
locations.

I need some legal advices about one of my packages, rfc2109 [1][2].

The main problem is that rfc2109.lisp contains verbatim parts of
RFC2109, RFC2068 and the Netscape cookie spec, documents that are not
free per the DFSG.  When I removed them [2], I forgot the parts in the
function descriptions, thus the package was rejected.

Soon after the rejection, upstream committed a sed script [3] to easily
remove the same RFC parts I removed (thus not the ones in the function
descriptions).  I find upstream solution (which replaces the RFC parts
with empty lines) better than mine because it doesn't change line
numbers and avoids conflicts when pulling from upstream.  The latter,
however, means that every time I pull from upstream, I need to re-apply
the sed script (just a minor annoyance).

However as already written, upstream solution, as mine, suffers the RFC
parts in the function descriptions.  Back in October 2006, Pierre
Thierry asked if these parts could be allowed even if not-free [4], but
no one answered him.  Since I'm not a license nor an RFC expert, here I
am :-)

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca

Footnotes: 
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=359348
[2] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repository/lcapello/
[2] Thu Jul 20 23:04:07 CEST 2006  Luca Capello <luca at pca.it>
      * remove the non-DFSG documents from rfc2109.lisp
    20060720210407-f6b0c-b84ff59374546e09173fadd6ec1b249db30b6fd2.gz
[3] Wed Aug  9 21:58:18 CEST 2006  Alan Shields <patches at alan.shields.name>
      * easily strip RFC from rfc2109 for copyright concerns
    20060809195818-df180-565dcf76a4cfffa29341ff033cbe3bb4362ab878.gz
[4] http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/cl-debian/2006-October/001957.html