Re: Question about todos.el copyright and author headers

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> In 2008 the sole author was Landstrom, and the file was named
> javascript.el.  Likewise, the sole author of the original todo-mode.el
> was Seidel.  One difference between the situation with js.el and that
> with todos.el is that AFAIK javascript.el was never part of Emacs under
> that name.  However, todos.el cannot be installed as todo-mode.el
> because the latter is not being removed at this time but moved to
> lisp/obsolete/,

I thought the plan was to install your code as todo-mode.el (not
todos-mode.el).

> Is it nevertheless acceptable to use the above copyright header in
> todos.el?

The only important part, legally is the "copyright" part, which should
simply include the old years since (IIUC) the code actually derives from
it (tho not much of it remains, it wasn't all written from scratch).

The "author" part is just important for the sake of acknowledging the
contribution of people, so even if someone's code has been 100%
superseded it's still perfectly fine to include his name there.
But the most important message here is: it doesn't matter, and
also, there's no harm in keeping more people in the list than
really necessary.  So just keep Seidel in the list and forget about it.

> (Regarding the parenthetical additions to the author lines,
> these are intended to avoid confusion and prevent mistaken
> attribution, similar to what's done in apropos.el.)

Nobody cares.  We have a ChangeLog for those who want to know who
contributed what.


        Stefan