recipe-guidelines.txt 3.1 KB

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081
  1. -*-text-*-
  2. Guidelines for contributions to the Guile Recipes manual
  3. --------------------------------------------------------
  4. 1. Licensing
  5. Contributions must be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
  6. License (GFDL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL).
  7. 2. Copyright
  8. Contributors are encouraged, but not required, to assign the copyright
  9. for their contribution to the FSF. `not required' also covers the
  10. case where a contributor has every intention of assigning copyright,
  11. but the process is simply taking a little time. Note that:
  12. - If you assign your copyright, other people (who have also assigned
  13. copyright) can make non-trivial enhancements to your contribution
  14. without any difficulties arising. If you don't assign copyright for
  15. contribution, it complicates the ownership picture if other people
  16. make non-trivial changes to it; and if the burden of tracking
  17. copyright ownership becomes too great, it will be easier simply to
  18. remove that contribution from the manual.
  19. - If it transpires that non-assigned copyrights turn out to be a bad
  20. thing (for whatever reason), the maintainers reserve the right to
  21. remove non-assigned contributions from the manual.
  22. 3. Manual organization
  23. Each contribution has its own chapter and lives in its own Texinfo
  24. file. Chapters in related areas may be grouped together, but maybe
  25. not. Instead, the introduction to the manual will contain references
  26. to chapters, and the introductory text will group those references
  27. appropriately.
  28. 4. Copyright ownership
  29. Given this organization, ownership for copyright purposes is
  30. straightforward. Each Texinfo file is either owned by its
  31. contributor, or assigned to the FSF.
  32. Every contribution's chapter should begin with a statement of who
  33. contributed it, who owns the copyright, and its license (GFDL or
  34. GPL). These statements should appear in the printed and online
  35. documentation -- i.e. they are _not_ comments.
  36. 5. Documentation vs. code
  37. Contributed material should be informative and helpful, and should fit
  38. in with the manual syntax. In general, this means that a
  39. straightforward lump of code is _not_ good enough -- it also needs the
  40. statements mentioned above, introduction, explanation or
  41. documentation, Texinfo markup, etc.
  42. Note that the maintainers may be able to accept a contribution that
  43. requires substantial extra work if copyright for that contribution has
  44. been assigned to the FSF. Where copyright has not been assigned, the
  45. contribution has to be already finished by its author.
  46. 6. Good indexing
  47. In practice, the manual index will be a very important tool for
  48. someone looking for an example that is useful to them. So please give
  49. some thought to good indexing in your contribution.
  50. 7. Submissions
  51. To submit material for inclusion in Guile Recipes, please send your
  52. contribution to the guile-sources mailing list
  53. <guile-sources@gnu.org>.
  54. As far as past material is concerned, I do have an archive of material
  55. that I will ask people about including individually, but it would make
  56. things easier for me if people resubmitted past material to
  57. guile-sources anyway.
  58. --
  59. Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net> April 20th 2001