-*-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 . 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 April 20th 2001