Richard Stallman has posted an updated list of suggested
documentation projects in the GNU task list to the info-gnu
list.
Stallman writes:
“Please see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html
for an explanation of why free software needs free
documentation.”
Below is Stallman’s complete post.
From rms@gnu.org Wed Nov 4 01:34:13 1998 Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1998 12:50:07 -0500 From: Richard Stallman To: info-gnu@gnu.org Subject: Which are the missing manuals? Resent-Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 17:31:27 -0500 Resent-From: info-gnu-request@gnu.org I would like to update the list of suggested documentation projects in the GNU task list. I've included the current list below; if you see anything that ought to be added, please email me the suggestions. The ultimate goal is to have free manuals for every aspect of the system; therefore, this list is not confined to software packages that are GNU software. If a free program is used in the GNU system or in GNU/Linux systems, and it does not now come with all the free manuals a user would wish for, then we want to include those missing manuals in this list. Please see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-doc.html for an explanation of why free software needs free documentation. Here is the existing list; the items are in no particular order. ====================================================================== A unified manual for LateX. A tutorial introduction to Midnight Commander. A manual for GNU SQL. A thorough manual for RCS. A reference manual for Mach. A reference manual for the GNU Hurd features in GNU libc. A manual for writing Hurd servers. A C reference manual. (RMS made a try at one, which you could start with). Reference manuals for C++, Objective C, Pascal, Fortran 77, and Java. A tutorial manual for the C++ STL (standard template library). GNU Objective-C Runtime Library Manual; this would be a reference manual for the runtime library functions, structures, and classes. Some work has been done on this job. Manuals for GNUstep: developer tutorial, developer programming manual, developer reference manual, and user manual. A manual for Ghostscript. A manual for TCSH. A good free reference manual for Perl. The free Perl on-line reference documentation is good, for what it is--a list of functions and a description of each--but that is not the same as a reference manual. (Compare, for example, the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual with the collection of documentation strings of Emacs Lisp functions.) A good free Perl language tutorial introduction. The existing Perl introductions are published with restrictions on copying and modification, so that they cannot be part of a GNU system. A manual for PIC (the graphics formatting language). A book on how GCC works and why various machine descriptions are written as they are. A manual for programming applications for X11. Manuals for various X window managers. Reference cards for those manuals that don't have them: C Compiler, Make, Texinfo, Termcap, and maybe the C Library. Many utilities need documentation, including grep and others.