Re: copyright notices (was: Re: Are we (nearly) ready for 3.4 yet?)

[Thomas Weber]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 06:49:45PM -0500, John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 15-Dec-2010, Søren Hauberg wrote:
> 
> | >   * Update copyright years.
> | 
> | You actually need to do that? I did not know that.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Actually, the FSF recommends updating the copyright year in all
> files in any year they are published.  Given that we use a public
> archive for development, all changes are published immediately, so we
> should really be updating the copyright notices near the beginning of
> each year.
> 
> This now somewhat complicated by things like
> 
>   Copyright (C) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002,
>                 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 John W. Eaton
>   Copyright (C) 2009 Jaroslav Hajek
>   Copyright (C) 2009, 2010 VZLU Prague
> 
> (in src/data.cc) or 
> 
>   Copyright (C) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 David Bateman
>   Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 Andy Adler
>   Copyright (C) 2010 VZLU Prague
> 
> (in liboctave/Sparse.cc).
> 
> One good thing is that the FSF has now changed its position on using
> ranges of years instead of requiring that each year be enumerated
> separately, so these statements can be condensed somewhat, but that is
> only part of the problem as I see it.  The bigger problem is deciding
> exactly which of these statements should be updated with the new year.
> All of them?  

I think that the simplest way out here is asking FSF. I don't believe
that Octave is the only project facing that problem. 

        Thomas