Re: [PATCH RFC] Update/correct copyright notices

Eli Zaretskii
2001-03-01T03:13:00Z

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Kevin Buettner wrote:

> I think the danger in this instance is minimal; if the script
> inadvertently decides that a sentence is a list of filenames, it will
> likely just end up generating warnings for a bunch of files that it
> can't find. The criteria that the script uses at the moment for
> deciding whether a list of space delimited "words" is a filename list
> or a sentence is to see if over half of the "words" have a dot in them
> followed by an alphanumeric character. If they do, the "word" list
> is considered to be a list of filenames, otherwise it is a sentence
> (which is discarded anyway).

IIRC, a valid ChangeLog entry cannot refer to more than one file,
probably because both a comma and a blank are valid file-name
characters. So this logic might work most of the time, but it is
in no way safe, IMHO.

> I think the following entry might be one of the harder ones to fix:
>
> Tue Jul 12 19:52:16 1988 Peter TerMaat (pete at corn-chex.ai.mit.edu)
>
> * Makefile, *.c, munch, config.gdb, README: New initialization
> scheme uses nm to find functions whose names begin with
> `_initialize_'. Files `initialize.h', `firstfile.c',
> `lastfile.c', `m-*init.h' no longer needed.

I would just throw it away, its content value is nil anyway. Something
like the following is much better, and even says what it does more
clearly (IMHO):

* Makefile: Use `nm' to find functions whose names begin with
`_initialize_' for initializing GDB. All *.c files changed
accordingly.

* munch: Likewise.

* config.gdb: Likewise.