copyright message with(out) directives

[Karl Berry]

Seeking advice ...

Is it better for translators to use placeholder directives in the
standard copyright message, like this (inherited in GNU Hello):

      printf (_("\
Copyright (C) %s Free Software Foundation, Inc.\n\
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A\n\
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  You may redistribute copies of GNU %s under the terms\n\
of the GNU General Public License.\n\
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.\n"),
              "2005", PACKAGE);

Or just hardwire the text like this (what I've been doing in Texinfo):

          puts ("Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.");
          printf (_("There is NO warranty.  You may redistribute this 
software\n\
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.\n\
For more information about these matters, see the files named COPYING.\n"));

I recall past discussions about this, but don't know what the current
preference is.


And, another point, I see that cp --version, for example, has somehwat
different wording:

    cp (GNU coreutils) 5.3.0
    Written by Torbjorn Granlund, David MacKenzie, and Jim Meyering.

    Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
    warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

The Hello text is closest to the coding standards, which say this:

          GNU Emacs 19.34.5
          Copyright (C) 1996 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
          GNU Emacs comes with NO WARRANTY,
          to the extent permitted by law.
          You may redistribute copies of GNU Emacs
          under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
          For more information about these matters,
          see the files named COPYING.

     You should adapt this to your program, of course, filling in the
     proper year, copyright holder, name of program, and the references
     to distribution terms, and changing the rest of the wording as
     necessary.

     This copyright notice only needs to mention the most recent year in
     which changes were made--there's no need to list the years for
     previous versions' changes.  You don't have to mention the name of
     the program in these notices, if that is inconvenient, since it
     appeared in the first line.

Thanks,
Karl