Re: RFA: Using year ranges in copyright notices...

Jan Kratochvil
2012-01-03T17:53:33Z

On Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:02:22 +0100, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> > The FSF rule for listing a year is "nontrivial changes to the package"
> > rather than "to that file" (this is the basis on which it's OK to update
> > the year in all files at the start of the year). As I understand it, this
> > combines with the rule about ranges to allow "<first-year>-2012" for every
> > file (at least, if there is some version in version control from each year
> > in the range).
[...]
> +Copyright and License Notices
> +=============================
> +
> +Most files maintained by the GDB Project contain a copyright notice
> +as well as a license notice, usually at the start of the file.
> +
> +To reduce the length of copyright notices, consecutive years in the
> +copyright notice can be combined into a single range. For instance,
> +the following list of copyright years...
> +
> + 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991-1993, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
> +
> +... is abbreviated into:
> +
> + 1986, 1988-1989, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2007-2011
> +
> +Such ranges are used when nontrivial changes were made to that file
> +each and every year in the range (inclusive).

This last sentence still contradict's the Joseph's comment / the FSF
statement:
http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Copyright-Notices
To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have
made nontrivial changes to the package.

As you automatically update all the files not each of the files will get
a nontrivial change for that year (2012 now).

IIUC this would allow us to write 1986-2011 everywhere as the GDB package was
nontrivially modified each of these years. Just restating Joseph.

Thanks,
Jan