Re: Updating copyright notices to 2015 for PGDG

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 08:46:19PM +0100, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
> > > I will run the script today. I didn't do it earlier because I want to
> > > be current on reading community email before doing it.
> >
> > hmm is it intentional that the commit also changed other files?
> >
> > looks like the commited patch added newlines to various files that had
> > none before for example:
>
> Specifically, these files had no newline after the last line in the
> file.

I don't think we have any files that require not to have a trailing
newline. Do we need an explicit check against it? Seems doubtful, but
then if the need arises, we will break it each year and who knows if
anybody will be vigilant enough to notice. Stefan caught it this time,
but who would normally skim 18000 lines of supposedly mechanical diff
looking for issues? (How did you catch this in the first place?)

This makes me wonder however how wise it is to update the copyright
notices in every single file in the repo. Why do we need this? Why not
abolish the practice and live forever with most files having copyright
2015? (Only new files would have newer years in their copyright
notices, I guess.) Does this provide us with any kind of protection,
and if so against what, and how does it protect us? Since we have a
very clean git history which shows us the exact provenance of every
single line of source code, and we have excellent mail archives that
show where each line came from for all development in the last decade,
this single line of (C) boilerplate in each file seems completely
pointless.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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