Re: Updating copyright notices to 2015 for PGDG

On 01/06/2015 10:12 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> 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?)

yeah while the trailing newline thingy does not seem to be a real issue
it still caught my eye when I was glancing at the diff (I was basically
scrolling through it when I noticed this)

>
> 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.

I dont know why it is really needed but maybe for the files that have
identical copyrights one could simple reference to the COPYRIGHT file we
already have in the tree?

Stefan