Re: Keeping copyright notices up to date

[Mark Harig]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 11:37:04PM +0100, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > 1. There are a number of Guile's files that have invalid copyright
> > notices because their years are listed as ranges, which is not
> > allowed, for example, the files guile/GNUmakefile and
> > guile/maint.mk.  The year range should be deleted and replaced
> > with a comma-separated list of years.

I listed these two files only as examples of ones that use
ranges.  I wasn't trying to point them out specifically.  I
did a quick search and found at least 193 files that use
ranges of years in the copyright line in the 'guile'
directory tree that is included in the repository.

> These two files are from Gnulib.  A recent addition to the Maintainers
> Guide allows the use of ranges provided README explains what the range
> means (info "(maintain) Copyright Notices").  We don’t do that, but 
OTOH
> these files are imported.

Thank you.  I do not have the GNU 'maintain' package
installed.  It is more detailed than the 'texinfo'
description of copyright requirements (and slightly
contradictory).

It includes this instruction:

  "You can use a range (‘2008-2010’) instead of listing
   individual years (‘2008, 2009, 2010’) if and only if: 1)
   every year in the range, inclusive, really is a
   “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually;
   and 2) you make an explicit statement in a ‘README’ file
   about this usage."

http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html#Copyright-Notices

> Would you like to raise this issue on address@hidden

Not at this time.  You are aware of the use of ranges and
have a solution for it.

--