discuss: [tbm@cyrius.com: Contacting mirrors with old HOWTOs?]
Subject:
Re: [tbm@cyrius.com: Contacting mirrors with old HOWTOs?]
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
13 Jan 2003 07:46:12 -0000
Message-Id: <20030113074338.GB314@lafn.org>
On Sat, Jan 11, 2003 at 02:35:56AM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 10:41:20AM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
[regarding stale HOWTOs]
> > I looked into this in Jan.-Mar. 2001 for my Modem-HOWTO. David Merrill
> > even wrote it up for the LWN. I found several hundred sites that had stale
> > docs. It would be quite a project to try to fix this, and many would
> > likely not respond or never get emails sent to them. Even ones that
> > responded, might not bother to fix the problem. I came up with the
> > suggestion that licenses prohibit distributing stale copies unless they
> > are clearly labelled as such.
>
> That cure is blatantly non-free (consider the person who runs an old
> system with similarly old versions of the HOWTOs installed and happens
> to export /usr/share/doc via HTTP, or for that matter the Debian
> archive) and far worse than the disease.
In that case they should provide some warning that the docs are likely
to be stale. Also, "stale" might be defined as over a month
out-of-date to provide some leeway.
> I rather doubt that Martin is interested in *suing* anyone - just
> wondering if anyone is looking into giving mirror sites a nudge.
You would only sue a site that flagrantly refused your requests to
update.
All official mirror sites are kept up-to-date since mirroring is done
automatically. The problem is with sites that are not official mirrors.
In some cases they have added advertising to the documents. In this
case, the fact that the docs are stale may cause the advertising to be
less effective once a user finds out that the docs are stale. So in
some sense, the stale docs tend to help educate people to go to an
official mirror and avoid such sites.
David Lawyer
