[Pkg-doc-linux-devel] Re: LDP "non-free" documents

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org):

> While most of this is correct, the parenthesised sentence at the end is
> at best highly misleading, and explaining how will probably clarify
> matters. Packagers do make initial decisions themselves while creating
> packages, but they can be overridden before they even become the package
> maintainer (i.e. before their package enters the archive), and in
> addition they can be overridden at a later date.

I have stated that, myself, on quite a number of occasions on LDP's
"discuss" mailing list.  I trust and hope that nobody was actually
mislead into thinking that nobody ever NMUs or otherwise alters a
developer's uploaded package -- having stated the reverse many times.

There _were_, after all, other posts in that and other related
discussions.

> The archive maintainers (commonly "ftpmasters") generally take into
> account discussions on the debian-legal mailing list while making these
> determinations. Thus, while it's true that any given discussion on
> debian-legal is just that of a random collection of people, conclusions
> reached by wide consensus on debian-legal (as opposed to merely
> consensus of the loud) have considerable force in practice.

The specific mechanism of that "considerable force" is _advisory_, yes?
Which is what I said.