Re: RFC: one more question about year ranges in copyright notices...

[Stan Shebs <stanshebs@earthlink.net>]

On 1/4/12 1:46 AM, Joel Brobecker wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I thought I was giong to do my best to forget about this as soon as
> the copyright notices would be updated, but what do you guys think
> of Jan's remark:
>
>>> +    1986, 1988, 1989, 1991-1993, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
>>> +
>>> +... is abbreviated into:
>>> +
>>> +    1986, 1988-1989, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2007-2011
> [...]
>> IIUC this would allow us to write 1986-2011 everywhere as the GDB
>> package was nontrivially modified each of these years.  Just restating
>> Joseph.
> Not totally critical, but I am seduced. I found that the formatting
> of many copyright headers look a bit ugly before the list of years
> shown in the notice is long enough that "Free Software Foundation, Inc."
> would not fit on the rest of the line.
>

I agree with making it 1986-2012 everywhere uniformly.

For files with new code, it would be nice if the first year in the pair 
could be the year of the file's creation - it's a little jarring to see 
something like tic6x-tdep.c with a 1986 date at the top of it.  On the 
other hand, a copyright range like 2005-2012 makes it unclear if one is 
trying to say that that a particular file was modified each year in the 
range, or that it's "inheriting" the range from GDB as a whole.

Stan