Re: copyright dates in binutils (and includes/)

[Alan Modra <amodra@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 06:47:17PM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Feb 2014, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> 
> > I should mention, however, that for us to use ranges like this,
> > the FSF asked us to add a note explaining that the copyright years
> > could be abbreviated into a range. See gdb/README (at the end).
> > I suspect that you'll need the same note for binutils.

Thanks Joel.  I'll copy that or the gcc wording.

> And, where a gap in the years is being implicitly filled in by conversion 
> to a range, make sure that either (a) there was a public version control 
> repository for binutils during that year, or (b) there was a release 
> (including beta releases, Cygnus releases etc., not just official 
> releases) during that year.

It looks like the earliest binutils files that are edited by
update-copyright.py have copyright dates starting at 1985.  Of those,
quite a few have skipped years.  eg. binutils/filemode.c is
Copyright 1985, 1990,...

So, CVS goes back to 1991, and there are copies of old binutils
releases for all years from 1988 to 2002 except for 1999 at
ftp://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/old-releases/

Joseph, do you know why implicitly adding years to the claimed
copyright years is a problem?  I'm guessing the file needs to be
published somewhere for each year claimed.

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM