Re: autoconf patches to add proper copyright notices

[Kevin Ryde]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Nope.  I did it by hand, during the wee hours of the morning when I'm
> awake but can't think well enough to code.  It would be nice to have
> such a tool, though.

I had a bit of a go at something like that for GMP.  Simple enough to
start but then it got a bit yucky from exceptions like

- whether the initial checkin is an import (no changes) or a new file
- rewrites or replacements not derived from past cvs revs
- changes to the copyright notice itself
- lex and yacc output which lose the copyright comments in the input
- files without copyright notices (README etc)
- files from elsewhere (config.guess etc)
- files not distributed (.cvsignore etc)

Very likely most of that could be covered with some stylized comments
in the log messages, if one didn't mind lots of "cvs admin -m" to get
old messages into a suitable form.