On 01/21/2015 04:49 PM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
The warranty got me to wondering. Maybe it would be convenient to have
a "make warranty" which runs a simple program that searches the source
tree making sure that each file has a warranty notice, and matches that
of some canonical warranty in the source tree somewhere. One could
change the canonical version of the warranty, then run "make warranty"
and all files would have, for example YYYY-2013 changed to YYYY-2015. It
could be a C program compiled with "make" or even an Octave script used
after Octave is compiled. So, if the warranty is to change with a new
year or whatever, change the canonical version, run "make warranty", and
then all the file changes will show up in Mercurial before committing
the changes.
Take a look at the build-aux/update-copyright script that is part of
gnulib. It might require some modification to work with Octave's
copyright notices, but it would be a good starting point.
Gnulib also provides some other tools for keeping things consistent in
source files. Take a look at the top-level Makefile and top/maint.mk
files in the gnulib sources. I have no objection to using similar things
for Octave.