extension copyrights

[Martin Geisler]

Christian Ebert <blacktrash at gmx.net> writes:

> BTW, what's the policy wrt to the copyright? Shouldn't it be updated
> to include 2009? Or are the changes considered too small?

I would prefer the copyright string to mention every year in which a
release was made containing changes to the file -- or in practice,
simply every year in which a change was made. This is recommended here:

  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html

But there seems to be nobody who updates the years.

To me, this makes the software look sloppy at best and outdated at
worst. If I download a tarball and see 2005 and 2006 mentioned as the
copyright years, then I'll begin wondering why the file hasn't been
updated for so long.

It would in some sense be better to just list the year in which the file
was introduced. But we have files that say "Copyright 2005-2007" even
when they have been worked on lots since (util.py for example).

I made a script a while ago, which can updated the files to include the
years in which they were changed based on 'hg log'.

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.
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