Not everyone agrees that docs are important, or that docs constitute part of software quality. This thread is not for them.

Emacs has copious well-written docs in the cloud. The web servers have become increasingly access-restricted. These docs are unreachable from the open free world (i.e. from Tor):

• 🔒 https://emacsdocs.org/
• 🔒 https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/

This is hit or miss:

• https://www.emacswiki.org/

These are all open access as of today:

• http://www.xemacs.org/
• https://emacsdocs.com/
• https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/emacs-21.2/html_chapter/emacs_12.html

Emacs has quite good built-in docs. But those cannot be regarded as complete.

One of the shittiest practices I have seen is man pages that include URLs to access-restricted Cloudflare sites. Either you are blocked from reaching the missing docs, or you submit to a US-based privacy abuser. If you are an offline user, you’re fucked.

Debian sets a good example

Well, to be clear, some Debian apps set a poor example. But the Debian Policy doc has good guidance:

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#additional-documentation

It suggests bundling external docs in a separate *-docs pkg. The gnucash-docs pkg serves as a great example of high-quality docs that are in the repo and exclude no one. More projects should follow that example because even offline people can reach the docs once they are installed. And with Debian, it’s possible to have a full release (90gb) on a drive which can obviously be accessed offline.