Re: Years in copyright notices

[storm@cua.dk (Kim F. Storm)]

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jun 23, 2004 at 10:08:41AM +0200, Kim F. Storm wrote:
> > A Miles pointed out, this will lead to some merge conflicts, but since
> > this is legal stuff, we have to accept that inconvenience.
> 
> Richard's post indicated that we do _not_ have to `accept that
> inconvenience', that it isn't a critical point.

Right, but if we make an effort to bring this fully up-to-date,
I suggest that we can just as well use the proper format.

> Making sure the copyright notices include the appropriate years is reasonable
> -- and probably won't result in all that many problems because many files are
> already up-to-date -- but changing the date format is apparently not
> necessary (according to Richard's post), and will result in many more
> conflicts.

Still, it will only result in conflicts in the files where you actually
did update the copyright notice on the branch.  If you didn't do that,
there will be no conflicts.

To me it doesn't make much sense to update the copyright on a "feature"
branch, as it is likely to conflict with updates on the trunk.  

Some users have copyright-update in the save-buffer-hook, so maybe
copyright-update should query vc to know if it's working on a branch
and not do any update in that situation (or at least query the user).

Of course, we also have release branches for maintenance releases,
and we should update copyrights on those branches -- but then we
normally don't merge to/from such branches.

-- 
Kim F. Storm <storm@cua.dk> http://www.cua.dk