On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Bernhard Voelker <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Assaf, > > On 08/16/2015 11:48 PM, Assaf Gordon wrote: >> On 08/16/2015 05:27 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: >>> Only 6 out of the 105 man/*.x files have a copyright notice: >>> >>> $ git ls-files -- man/*.x | wc -l >>> 105 >>> >>> $ GIT_PAGER= git grep Copyright -- man/*.x >>> man/chmod.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >>> man/chown.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >>> man/df.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >>> man/du.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >>> man/rm.x:'\" Copyright (C) 1998-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >>> man/stdbuf.x:'\" Copyright (C) 2009-2015 Free Software Foundation, Inc. >>> >>> The following patch would remove it from there. Okay? >> >> I'd suggest keeping them. >> >> The copyright statements (and license notices that follows below them) are >> troff comments, >> and these ".x" files can be considered "source files" - which are later >> merged into the final man page file. > > help2man places a separate copyright notice into the man/*.1 files, > regardless of whether the *.x includes it or not. > >> Using my 'savannah volunteer' hat: every 'large enough' source file hosted >> on gnu savannah should carry a clear copyright statement and license notice; >> the cut-off for 'large enough' is usually 20 lines or more, which seems to >> fit this case: > > I see the point of having such a legal notice. However, I don't > like the idea of having it only in a couple of files, depending on > a line count threshold. E.g. we'll most probably forget to add/remove > the note if a *.x file grows or shrinks. > > Therefore, adding such a note to all *.x files seems to be more consistent. > So back to the question in my original mail: > what copyright year range should be chosen? > > Thanks & have a nice day, > Berny
Hi Berny, Here's another alternative: leave as-is, but add a syntax-checking rule to formalize the policy. It feels suboptimal to increase the size of each of those 100+ tiny man/*.x files by 270-ish bytes just to add that copyright notice (increasing their sizes by 2-4x). Thanks, Jim
