Can doc/ contain documentation independently of source/

[jfbu]

Hi Karl, and Joseph,
>>
>> The primary purpose of requiring sources is not about recreating the
>> pdfs as distributing, but for the general reason for free software in
>> the first place: so that if someone enhances the package, they can also
>> update the documentation. In principle.
> 
> Indeed. The build scripts or whatever are nice but not essential: one can find a way to build a .dtx or whatever to a PDF. But without the source files you can't do that even by hand.

Thanks Karl for pointing this out.
I did not have this in mind, but I should have.

I would say this weltanschauung
predates our current era where most open source projects
have a publicly available access, even often to
the version control project history, or some
part of it.
I understand a distro maintainer may feel like
it is best to distribute also such sources.
Nevertheless, why should it be to a secondary
entity (the distribution) to feel responsible
for providing means to end users to engage
into forking distributed packages? The whole
thing does not look completely sound to me.
It looks even like a kind of appropriation
manoeuver by those secondary distributors.
As an author I could estimate it is my right
to keep a hand on how people can and will
fork my projects, and for this to keep having
my hands on how that process should be enacted.

Besides, as you say, this is "in principle".
Best,

Jean-François