maint.mk and NEWS footer

[Eric Blake]

I noticed that NEWS_hash in maint.mk doesn't work for m4.  Why?  Because m4 
uses long-hand copyright years, and lists enough years that the 
regex '^Copyright.*Free Software' no longer matches.  In other words, adding 
2010 to the copyright changed the old news hash.

For that matter, NEWS_hash is using 'sed | grep -v'.  It seeems like it should 
be possible to sanitize the copyright line(s) all within the sed, without 
having to use a secondary grep process.  But I'm not fluent enough with sed to 
quickly write a script that can sanitize both styles into a single recognizable 
line:

Copyright (C) 1992, 1993, 1994, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010
Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Meanwhile, with the recent GFDL change [1], the coreutils NEWS hash also ended 
up with an alteration, detected by 'make syntax-check' (via 
sc_immutable_NEWS).  Therefore, how about this patch, which just ignores the 
NEWS footer altogether (to be applied before the amended coreutils patch, so 
that I'm only updating the coreutils hash once)?

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.coreutils.bugs/19496

However, if this patch is applied, everyone using maint.mk will need to do a 
one-time run of 'make update-NEWS-hash' to update their saved hash the footer 
discarded.

Yes, this patch did not use portable spacing of the sed {} command, but anyone 
running GNUMakefile probably has a decent sed on their PATH and doesn't have to 
obey the portability rule of putting { and } on their own lines.

Comments?




From: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 10:03:34 -0700
Subject: [PATCH] maint.mk: ignore entire footer of NEWS file

The old algorithm did not work for projects like m4 that used
long-hand copyright years that wrapped lines.  Also, it failed
when upgrading from GFDL 1.2 to GFDL 1.3 in the NEWS footer.

* top/maint.mk (NEWS_hash): Add immunity to multi-line copyright
or GFDL license changes.

Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
---
 ChangeLog    |    6 ++++++
 top/maint.mk |    5 ++---
 2 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index 8cf4fae..af711e4 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,9 @@
+2010-01-06  Eric Blake  <address@hidden>
+
+       maint.mk: ignore entire footer of NEWS file
+       * top/maint.mk (NEWS_hash): Add immunity to multi-line copyright
+       or GFDL license changes.
+
 2009-11-17  Eric Blake  <address@hidden>

        manywarnings: add more warnings
diff --git a/top/maint.mk b/top/maint.mk
index 40f306e..c4353bd 100644
--- a/top/maint.mk
+++ b/top/maint.mk
@@ -548,9 +548,8 @@ sc_const_long_option:
              exit 1; } || :

 NEWS_hash =                                                            \
-  $$(sed -n '/^\*.* $(PREV_VERSION_REGEXP) ([0-9-]*)/,$$p'             \
-       $(srcdir)/NEWS                                                  \
-     | grep -v '^Copyright .*Free Software'                            \
+  $$(sed -n '/^\*.* $(PREV_VERSION_REGEXP) ([0-9-]*)/,/^Copyright/ {   \
+       /^Copyright/d; p }' $(srcdir)/NEWS                              \
      | md5sum -                                                        
        \
      | sed 's/ .*//')

-- 
1.6.4.2