Alan,
I was responsible for updating the copyrights for JavaME. I used a
Perl script to update the copyright year in the source files. I can
point you to the relevant information if you like. There were challenges
as there are various copyrights in the source files (Oracle, Oracle +
3rd-party, 3rd party only, and no copyright), all with different
formats, and even within the Oracle copyrights, people used subtle
differences which caused difficulties. I ended updating all copyrights
to a few formats and adding a post-commit script which scrubbed the
copyright and notified the committer if the copyright wasn't in the
correct format and didn't have an ending year (or sole year) which is
the current year.
There are plenty of options here:
- Do nothing (policy)
- Pre-commit script which changes the year automatically
- Pre-commit script which rejects commit with wrong year
- Post-commit script which flags a bad copyright, but accepts commit
- Others
Updating the copyright year as you commit is a good habit to get into,
but ultimately there are files which never get touched which will need
processing to update the year. I think doing this at the end/beginning
of the year is good, we just need to make sure we get the copyright
correct when processing.
Darryl
On 11/02/2012 05:46 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
Now for some noise.
The copyright date in the source files needs updating. The man behind
the curtain is Steve Sides from the Quality and Release Engineering
team in Oracle. Jon pushed, on Steve's behalf, the update to the
langtools files recently [1], and Mikael updated hotspot [2]. The
elephant is the jdk repository as there are 3000+ files that need
their headers updated.
To keep the disruption to a minimum I propose that we do the jdk
repository in two steps: non-client area now to jdk8/tl, and then the
client-area later in jdk8/awt once the changes get there. I use the
term "client-area" loosely to mean the source files for awt, swing,
font, java2d, etc. (and I appreciate that there is also a jdk8/2d
forest in use). To that end here is the proposed patch for today:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~alanb/7197491/copyright.patch
This patch updates the headers on 2370 files. I don't propose to
publish a webrev as it's just too big.
This patch was created with:
cd jdk
sh ../make/scripts/update_copyright_year.sh 2011
sh ../make/scripts/update_copyright_year.sh 2012
hg revert --no-backup `cat clientdirs.list`
hg diff -g > copyright.patch
where clientdirs.list is most of the directories corresponding to the
client area.
Note that I ran the update_copyright_year.sh script twice, once for
2011 and then a second time for 2012. The reason for this is that
there are several hundred files in the jdk repository that were last
updated in 2011 but have an older date on the header.
Reviewer welcome but I should say that I don't have cycles to spend on
this. Also the patch has an a very short shelf life.
Finally, I think that there needs to be wider discussion as to how to
keep the headers from falling behind too much. Some people do update
the headers when editing files, some people (including myself) do not.
It seems to me that it should be done regularly anyway, perhaps every
few months or at integration time every so often.
-Alan.
[1] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/tl/langtools/rev/9d47f4850714
[2] http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/hotspot/rev/b9a9ed0f8eeb
