Re: Maintaining copyright notices

[Andrew Janke]

On 1/3/20 7:10 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> The Octave source files currently contain copyright notices that list
> individual contributors.  I adopted these file-scope copyright notices
> because that is what everyone was doing 30 years ago in the days before
> distributed version control systems.  But now, with many contributors
> and modern version control systems, having these file-scope copyright
> notices causes trouble when we update copyright years or refactor code.
> [...]
> To minimize the difficulty of maintaining the copyright notices, I would
> like to change Octave's sources to use what is described here
> 
> 
> https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html
> 
> 
> in the section "Maintaining centralized copyright notices":

[...]

I am a big fan of this proposed change. I think it'll end up being more
correct, in addition to easier to maintain.

> Additionally, I think it is time to drop the "Author:", "Created:",
> "Adapted-by:" and similar lines that appear in some source files since
> that information is incomplete, tends to become inaccurate over time,
> and is duplicated in the version control system (where it is also most
> likely to be correct).

:+1:

Cheers,
Andrew