Re: Update copyright for 2016/17 files, and script (issue 320390043by address@hidden)

[Urs Liska]

Am 23.03.2017 um 12:04 schrieb Phil Holmes:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrew Bernard"
> <address@hidden>
> To: "Urs Liska" <address@hidden>; "Devel" <address@hidden>
> Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2017 10:18 AM
> Subject: Re: Update copyright for 2016/17 files, and script (issue
> 320390043by address@hidden)
>
>
>> Hi Urs,
>>
>> My understanding of copyright is that the date range applies to the
>> published work as a whole, and does not operate on the granularity of
>> individual components. Furthermore, there is no legal requirement to
>> actually have a copyright notice at all, as works are naturally
>> copyright
>> nowadays, and the notice is really only as a partial, and not critical,
>> piece of backup evidence used if cases go to court.
>>
>> I speak from my knowledge of copyright in Australia, which is bound
>> to be
>> different to Germany, as copyright law is inconsistent across regions.
>>
>> Andrew
>
> I think the copyright notice is a requirement of the GNU Ts and Cs:
>
> "Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two
> elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such
> as "Copyright 1999 Terry Jones"), and a statement of copying
> permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of
> the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL)."
>
> https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html
>

Yes, but this doesn't change the question of whether all files should
have the latest year or their individual "latest year".

I think it's clear by now that we don't need the individual updates.

A question I have is then: how can we ensure this is actually done
*every* year? It actually *is* embarrassing that the released versions
give a wrong year in the output of lilypond --version.

Can running make grand-replace (and committing the results be made part
of the release process? I think in all cases where no new files (with
copied wrong years) are added to the code base this should actually not
introduce any changes.

Urs