On 8/29/07, Patrick R. Michaud <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 02:44:13PM +0200, Paul Cochrane wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I've recently added a test to the coding standards tests which checks > > for a copyright statement, and that the copyright date is up to date. > > After a discussion on #parrot, Coke made the observation that maybe > > the most recent date shouldn't be the same as the current year because > > the file might not have been updated for a couple of years. So, the > > question I'd like to post to the list is: how do we define the year > > range in the copyright statement in source files? Should it be > > C<start-year>-C<current-year> or C<start-year>-C<year-last-updated>? > > I think this was discussed once before, and the conclusion was > that the copyright years should reflect the date a file was > last updated. > it's my understanding that the only important copyright is the one in the README; the per-file copyrights are not a legal neccessity and remain only as a convention.
> Personally, I think that a testing for the existence of a copyright > statement is good, but that the test should not be trying to > enforce specific dates or a specific policy on dates -- there > are likely to be too many exceptions. > i agree. this seems to be a job only a human can do well. are the following changes worthy of a copyright update? repository metadata updates changes to the file modifying whitespace in syntactically insignificant ways etc. i don't expect answers. i think the best we can do is make sure the official copyright, in README, is always up to date, and make sure the others are reasonably correct and correctly formatted. ~jerry
