It was recently confirmed for GDB <http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2012-01/msg00936.html> that it's OK to collapse a list of copyright years into a single range (given the required README statement about ranges) even if there were gaps in the original list. This is inline with the principle described in maintain.texi that you only need to track years when nontrivial changes were made to the package as a whole, not which files were changed in each year.
When I suggested doing this for glibc, the question was raised about whether that ruling applied to all GNU packages and whether the ruling was properly documented. It seems like quite a common issue for packages converting to ranges, so documenting in maintain.texi would seem like a good idea. In particular, the rule about adding all years when the whole package was changed comes with the caveat "(Here we assume you're using a publicly accessible revision control server, so that every revision installed is also immediately and automatically published.)". That's sufficient for new years, but what about older ones when the package may not have had public version control (or may have had version control that was private at the time with the history later made public)? Could a rule for collapsing to ranges be documented that makes it clear when in such cases it's OK to use a range even though the years previously listed in the file had some intermediate years missing? -- Joseph S. Myers [email protected]
