Re: Copyright information in source files

On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 2:12 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>
> Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > I'd like to get rid of those IDENTIFICATION lines completely (they are
> > left over from the time when the project used CVS, and that section
> > had a $Header$ "ident" tag, but in the git era, those ident tags are
> > no longer in fashion).
>
> I'm not for that. Arguments about CVS vs git are irrelevant: the
> usefulness of those lines comes up when you've got a file that's
> not in your source tree but somewhere else. It's particularly
> useful for the Makefiles, which are otherwise often same-y and
> hard to identify.
>
> > There are other inconsistencies in the copyright messages, like
> > whether we say "Portions" or not for PGDU, and whether we use 1996- or
> > the year the file was created, and whether the Berkeley copyright is
> > there or not (different people seem to have different ideas about
> > whether that's needed for a post-Berkeley file).
>
> Yeah, it'd be nice to have some greater consistency there. My own
> thought about it is that it's rare to have a file that's *completely*
> de novo code, and can be guaranteed to stay that way --- more usually
> there is some amount of copying&pasting, and then you have to wonder
> how much of that material could be traced back to Berkeley. So I
> prefer to err on the side of including their copyright. That line of
> argument basically leads to the conclusion that all the copyright tags
> should be identical, which doesn't seem like an unreasonable rule.
>

I had seen that most files use the below format:
/*-------------------------------------------------------------------------
* relation.c
* PostgreSQL logical replication
*
* Copyright (c) 2016-2019, PostgreSQL Global Development Group
*
* IDENTIFICATION
* src/backend/replication/logical/relation.c
*
* NOTES
* This file contains helper functions for logical replication relation
* mapping cache.
*
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------
*/

Can we use the above format as a standard format?

Regards,
Vignesh
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com