Re: RFC: stop doing "grand replace" updates to copyright years

[Jonas Hahnfeld]

On Mon, 2023-02-13 at 13:36 +0100, Janneke Nieuwenhuizen wrote:
> Han-Wen Nienhuys writes:
> 
> Hey,
> 
> > Every year, we go over the source code to update the copyright years
> > that are found in the source headers. I propose to stop this.
> 
> +1
> 
> > Also note that many other projects (eg. git) seem to survive just fine
> > without yearly exercise like this.
> 
> Yes.  Of course, git is not a GNU project but I see this in projects
> like Guix too.  usually, $author includes a copyright year update in
> their patch when they make a change to a file.  For trivial changes, it
> could be skipped but that's often usually up to the courtesy of $author.

This is the approach I like the least of the three options, the others
being the status quo and updating all files (as recommended by GNU, see
Jean's reply) or to not have any years at all (like for example curl
does: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-years/).
Updating years together with actual changes just calls for conflicts
when two merge requests update the same file, or even worse when
picking a fix to the stable branch. I'm against that if the "solution"
is to just keep doing what we have in place right now.

Han-Wen, could you please clarify which option you are proposing
exactly?

Side comment: IANAL, but my understanding is that copyright notices are
notoriously wrong (at least for LilyPond) because every author retains
their copyright. For that, it is simply irrelevant what a comment at
the top of the file says, or even factually wrong if it only lists one
(primary) author.

Jonas

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part