Re: remove copyright from man/*.x ?

[Jim Meyering]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Bernhard Voelker
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Assaf,
>
> On 08/16/2015 11:48 PM, Assaf Gordon wrote:
>> On 08/16/2015 05:27 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>>> Only 6 out of the 105 man/*.x files have a copyright notice:
>>>
>>>    $ git ls-files -- man/*.x | wc -l
>>>    105
>>>
>>>    $ GIT_PAGER= git grep Copyright -- man/*.x
>>>    man/chmod.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>>    man/chown.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>>    man/df.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>>    man/du.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>>    man/rm.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>>    man/stdbuf.x:'\" Copyright (C) 2009-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>>>
>>> The following patch would remove it from there.  Okay?
>>
>> I'd suggest keeping them.
>>
>> The copyright statements (and license notices that follows below them) are 
>> troff comments,
>> and these ".x" files can be considered "source files" - which are later 
>> merged into the final man page file.
>
> help2man places a separate copyright notice into the man/*.1 files,
> regardless of whether the *.x includes it or not.
>
>> Using my 'savannah volunteer' hat: every 'large enough' source file hosted 
>> on gnu savannah should carry a clear copyright statement and license notice; 
>> the cut-off for 'large enough' is usually 20 lines or more, which seems to 
>> fit this case:
>
> I see the point of having such a legal notice.  However, I don't
> like the idea of having it only in a couple of files, depending on
> a line count threshold.  E.g. we'll most probably forget to add/remove
> the note if a *.x file grows or shrinks.
>
> Therefore, adding such a note to all *.x files seems to be more consistent.
> So back to the question in my original mail:
> what copyright year range should be chosen?
>
> Thanks & have a nice day,
> Berny

Hi Berny,

Here's another alternative: leave as-is, but add a syntax-checking rule to
formalize the policy. It feels suboptimal to increase the size of each of
those 100+ tiny man/*.x files by 270-ish bytes just to add that copyright
notice (increasing their sizes by 2-4x).

Thanks,
Jim