doc/recipe-guidelines.txt

   1                                             -*-text-*-
   2
   3 Guidelines for contributions to the Guile Recipes manual
   4 --------------------------------------------------------
   5
   6 1. Licensing
   7
   8 Contributions must be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation
   9 License (GFDL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL).
  10
  11 2. Copyright
  12
  13 Contributors are encouraged, but not required, to assign the copyright
  14 for their contribution to the FSF.  `not required' also covers the
  15 case where a contributor has every intention of assigning copyright,
  16 but the process is simply taking a little time.  Note that:
  17
  18 - If you assign your copyright, other people (who have also assigned
  19   copyright) can make non-trivial enhancements to your contribution
  20   without any difficulties arising.  If you don't assign copyright for
  21   contribution, it complicates the ownership picture if other people
  22   make non-trivial changes to it; and if the burden of tracking
  23   copyright ownership becomes too great, it will be easier simply to
  24   remove that contribution from the manual.
  25
  26 - If it transpires that non-assigned copyrights turn out to be a bad
  27   thing (for whatever reason), the maintainers reserve the right to
  28   remove non-assigned contributions from the manual.
  29
  30 3. Manual organization
  31
  32 Each contribution has its own chapter and lives in its own Texinfo
  33 file.  Chapters in related areas may be grouped together, but maybe
  34 not.  Instead, the introduction to the manual will contain references
  35 to chapters, and the introductory text will group those references
  36 appropriately.
  37
  38 4. Copyright ownership
  39
  40 Given this organization, ownership for copyright purposes is
  41 straightforward.  Each Texinfo file is either owned by its
  42 contributor, or assigned to the FSF.
  43
  44 Every contribution's chapter should begin with a statement of who
  45 contributed it, who owns the copyright, and its license (GFDL or
  46 GPL).  These statements should appear in the printed and online
  47 documentation -- i.e. they are _not_ comments.
  48
  49 5. Documentation vs. code
  50
  51 Contributed material should be informative and helpful, and should fit
  52 in with the manual syntax.  In general, this means that a
  53 straightforward lump of code is _not_ good enough -- it also needs the
  54 statements mentioned above, introduction, explanation or
  55 documentation, Texinfo markup, etc.
  56
  57 Note that the maintainers may be able to accept a contribution that
  58 requires substantial extra work if copyright for that contribution has
  59 been assigned to the FSF.  Where copyright has not been assigned, the
  60 contribution has to be already finished by its author.
  61
  62 6. Good indexing
  63
  64 In practice, the manual index will be a very important tool for
  65 someone looking for an example that is useful to them.  So please give
  66 some thought to good indexing in your contribution.
  67
  68 7. Submissions
  69
  70 To submit material for inclusion in Guile Recipes, please send your
  71 contribution to the guile-sources mailing list
  72 <guile-sources@gnu.org>.
  73
  74 As far as past material is concerned, I do have an archive of material
  75 that I will ask people about including individually, but it would make
  76 things easier for me if people resubmitted past material to
  77 guile-sources anyway.
  78
  79 --
  80 Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net> April 20th 2001