Updating license and copyright in file headers

Martin Geisler mg at lazybytes.net
Tue Apr 14 14:21:17 CDT 2009


Hi everybody

I would like to update the copyright and license information in the file
headers to be more consistent and correct:

* Some files list only 'Matt Mackall' as the author, despite being
  edited by many others.

* The years mentioned in the copyright lines are often outdated or wrong
  compared to the information we have on file via 'hg log'.

* Some files put the copyright and license information into a docstring,
  others put it into a comment block.

* Most files say "GPL" when "GPLv2" is meant.

Instead of listing individual authors in the files I suggest that we
either put something like

  #  Copyright 2005-2009 Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com>

or maybe

  #  Copyright 2005-2009 Mercurial Developers <mercurial-devel at selenic.com>

into each file. Then there will be one year to update when the file is
saved the first time in a new year. As it is right now I haven't updated
any of the years when editing files since it feels strange to update a
line like this from archival.py:

  #  Copyright 2006 Vadim Gelfer <vadim.gelfer at gmail.com>

where Vadim hasn't made any commits since 2006.

The GPL says that one must put in "appropriate copyright notices" and
license the modified work under the GPL as well, so I think we can
safely change a line like the above to

  #  Copyright 2006-2009 Mercurial Developers <mercurial-devel at selenic.com>

without having to contact people. If anybody knows more this I would of
course be happy to hear it?

The GPL is also only concerned with the distribution of programs, not
the use, so I suggest we simplify the header from:

  # This software may be used and distributed according to the terms of
  # the GNU General Public License, incorporated herein by reference.

to

  # This software may be distributed according to the terms of the GNU
  # General Public License version 2, incorporated herein by reference.

where I removed 'used and ' and put in ' version 2'.


I have made a small script which can update the files automatically, it
puts in the new license text and uses 'hg log -f file' to figure out
when each file was edited. It can also switch the headers to use a
comment block or a docstring depending on what we want.

But I would like to hear from Matt and others if they even think it's a
good idea to do this?

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial-devel/attachments/20090414/ef3b4a88/attachment.pgp 


More information about the Mercurial-devel mailing list