| -*-text-*- | |
| Guidelines for contributions to the Guile Recipes manual | |
| -------------------------------------------------------- | |
| 1. Licensing | |
| Contributions must be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation | |
| License (GFDL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL). | |
| 2. Copyright | |
| Contributors are encouraged, but not required, to assign the copyright | |
| for their contribution to the FSF. `not required' also covers the | |
| case where a contributor has every intention of assigning copyright, | |
| but the process is simply taking a little time. Note that: | |
| - If you assign your copyright, other people (who have also assigned | |
| copyright) can make non-trivial enhancements to your contribution | |
| without any difficulties arising. If you don't assign copyright for | |
| contribution, it complicates the ownership picture if other people | |
| make non-trivial changes to it; and if the burden of tracking | |
| copyright ownership becomes too great, it will be easier simply to | |
| remove that contribution from the manual. | |
| - If it transpires that non-assigned copyrights turn out to be a bad | |
| thing (for whatever reason), the maintainers reserve the right to | |
| remove non-assigned contributions from the manual. | |
| 3. Manual organization | |
| Each contribution has its own chapter and lives in its own Texinfo | |
| file. Chapters in related areas may be grouped together, but maybe | |
| not. Instead, the introduction to the manual will contain references | |
| to chapters, and the introductory text will group those references | |
| appropriately. | |
| 4. Copyright ownership | |
| Given this organization, ownership for copyright purposes is | |
| straightforward. Each Texinfo file is either owned by its | |
| contributor, or assigned to the FSF. | |
| Every contribution's chapter should begin with a statement of who | |
| contributed it, who owns the copyright, and its license (GFDL or | |
| GPL). These statements should appear in the printed and online | |
| documentation -- i.e. they are _not_ comments. | |
| 5. Documentation vs. code | |
| Contributed material should be informative and helpful, and should fit | |
| in with the manual syntax. In general, this means that a | |
| straightforward lump of code is _not_ good enough -- it also needs the | |
| statements mentioned above, introduction, explanation or | |
| documentation, Texinfo markup, etc. | |
| Note that the maintainers may be able to accept a contribution that | |
| requires substantial extra work if copyright for that contribution has | |
| been assigned to the FSF. Where copyright has not been assigned, the | |
| contribution has to be already finished by its author. | |
| 6. Good indexing | |
| In practice, the manual index will be a very important tool for | |
| someone looking for an example that is useful to them. So please give | |
| some thought to good indexing in your contribution. | |
| 7. Submissions | |
| To submit material for inclusion in Guile Recipes, please send your | |
| contribution to the guile-sources mailing list | |
| <[email protected]>. | |
| As far as past material is concerned, I do have an archive of material | |
| that I will ask people about including individually, but it would make | |
| things easier for me if people resubmitted past material to | |
| guile-sources anyway. | |
| -- | |
| Neil Jerram <[email protected]> April 20th 2001 | |