Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Two question which I have to pass on

[Sylvain Beucler]

Thanks for all those precisions.

Should we complete the Savannah wiki, or add a rationale in
maintain.texi?

Note: when you take a file from a project to another, usually you
don't copy the history along - another reason to keep the information
in the file rather than relying on the VCS :)

-- 
Sylvain


On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 02:23:27PM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> > Sebastian Gerhardt wrote:
> > > a maintainer asked me about the reason we give the adive to write
> > > explicit copyright dates--not ranges. Why is it better to do this?
> > 
> > That's what the FSF lawyers recommend
> > http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html
> > 
> > "Do not abbreviate the year list using a range; for instance, do not
> >  write '1996--1998'; instead, write '1996, 1997, 1998'."
> > 
> > The document doesn't justify this recommendation.  Maybe Karl knows,
> > otherwise we can ask address@hidden, otherwise we can assume that,
> 
> As I recall from previous discussion this is so that searching for a
> specific year can locate the document more easily.  For instance in
> the range 2005-2009 searching for "2007" won't locate that document.
> Specifying the list of dates facilitates this part from the
> Copyright-Notices document:
> 
>   Don't delete old year numbers, though; they are significant since they
>   indicate when older versions might theoretically go into the public
>   domain, if the movie companies don't continue buying laws to further
>   extend copyright.  If you copy a file into the package from some other
>   program, keep the copyright years that come with the file.
> 
> The Copyright-Notices document also says:
> 
>   Sometimes a program has an overall copyright notice that refers to the
>   whole program.  It might be in the README file, or it might be
>   displayed when the program starts up.  This copyright notice should
>   mention the year of completion of the most recent major version; it
>   can mention years of completion of previous major versions, but that
>   is optional.
> 
> Therefore an overall date such as in --version output may use just the
> latest year and does not need to display the long list of dates that
> are needed in a file's copyright notice.
> 
> Of course many of these rules and guidelines are very general best
> practices and date from before projects *always* had version control
> meta-information available for them.  (All projects today use a
> version control system, right? :-) Some of these I am certain are
> there to benefit a project that exists as distribution only without
> any way to look at the version control history.  And having had to
> deal with lawyers on these matters I can say from first hand
> experience that most of them do not understand the concept of version
> control systems and so it is much better to have a clean paper trail
> plainly visible in the files and not need to fall back to using the
> meta-information of a version control system.  So I think these are
> still good ideas today too.