Re: Further suggestions for Copyright Notices

[John W. Eaton]

On 1/7/20 3:16 PM, Rik wrote:
> On 01/07/2020 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:

> I agree with external code being excluded.  For the manual, what are the 
> arguments against using the same system as for the code (consistency 
> normally being a good thing)?

I'm OK with using the same copyright notice for the manual especially 
since much (most?) of it is made up of doc strings extracted from the 
sources.  I was thinking more about whether we should continue to list 
the authorship the same way as we have now?

> > I used a script to generate the initial COPYRIGHT.md file.  I'm not 
> > sure that it's necessary to add it to the hg archive, but I can share 
> > it if there is interest.
>
> If it is a one-off script needed to create the first version then it 
> doesn't require version control.  If it is a script that will need to be 
> executed every time there is a new release then that should go somewhere 
> in the hg archive, maybe build-aux/?

No, it's not something that should need to be run again.  I think we 
should just make corrections and maintain it mostly manually now.  We 
can extract a list of most of the contributors for a given year from the 
hg archive automatically, then insert them in the file or update 
existing entries as needed.

> I would change the visual formatting of the Copyright block.  Below is 
> the current format as taken from wilkinson.m.
>
> ## [...]
>
> function retval = wilkinson (n)
>
>    if (nargin != 1)
>      print_usage ();
>    endif
>
> As a programmer, I acknowledge the Copyright but I don't want to be 
> distracted by it.  I would like to be able to immediately find where the 
> code (my interest) begins.  To do that, I would set off the Copyright 
> block in some manner from the rest of the file.  A common demarcation 
> might be a line of 80 '#' characters.

I'm not a big fan of these kinds of markers, but it seems OK for the 
copyright.  How about 72 characters?  I don't know why, but like seeing 
a margin on the right side.  Though line widths are kind of arbitrary 
now that we are not limited by 80x24 CRT displays.  Also, maybe use C++ 
style '//' comments for these copyright notices as well?

> Another demarcation might be two newlines after the end of the GPL clauses.

After doing some experiments with the comment markers above and below 
the text, I'm not sure that's really necessary.

> Although copyright and 
> license are different, I don't see the need to distinguish them so 
> strongly by having two newlines after the copyright and before the GPL 
> clauses.  I would take this back down to one newline.

OK.

> Also, this file happens to still have an "Author:" line.  Is it still 
> planned to remove these before the 6.1 release?

Yes, I just didn't get that far yet.

jwe