After the patch I installed to inetutils [1], I think actually the only problem is that the gnulib 'fdl' module is a moving target. That doesn't really work, as Karl explained, since the main manual needs to be updated manually whenever there is a FDL version update in gnulib.
Right. So in gnulib, I propose we deprecated 'fdl' and ask maintainers to depend directly on 'fdl-1.3' or whatever version they need. Thoughts? I agree.