Re: RFA: Using year ranges in copyright notices...

[Joel Brobecker <brobecker at adacore dot com>]

> > +Such ranges are used when nontrivial changes were made to that file
> > +each and every year in the range (inclusive).
> 
> The FSF rule for listing a year is "nontrivial changes to the package" 
> rather than "to that file" (this is the basis on which it's OK to update 
> the year in all files at the start of the year).  As I understand it, this 
> combines with the rule about ranges to allow "<first-year>-2012" for every 
> file (at least, if there is some version in version control from each year 
> in the range).

That's a good point, thank you.

I propose we simply remove that sentence, then. It's not really
all that necessary, after all. Here is a new revision.

Thoughts?
-- 
Joel

commit 04d2588d202f0bc2f49e68aff22c152ec8cd277a
Author: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
Date:   Tue Jan 3 12:41:50 2012 +0400

    [README] Add not about copyright and license notices
    
    Also explain the use of year ranges in copyright notices.
    
    gdb/ChangeLog:
    
            * README (Copyright and License Notices): New section.

diff --git a/gdb/README b/gdb/README
index d79fecc..7ffe90a 100644
--- a/gdb/README
+++ b/gdb/README
@@ -638,6 +638,26 @@ testsuite `standalone', without it being part of the GDB source tree.
 
 See the DejaGNU documentation for further details.
 
+
+Copyright and License Notices
+=============================
+
+Most files maintained by the GDB Project contain a copyright notice
+as well as a license notice, usually at the start of the file.
+
+To reduce the length of copyright notices, consecutive years in the
+copyright notice can be combined into a single range.  For instance,
+the following list of copyright years...
+
+    1986, 1988, 1989, 1991-1993, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
+
+... is abbreviated into:
+
+    1986, 1988-1989, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2007-2011
+
+Such ranges are used when nontrivial changes were made to that file
+each and every year in the range (inclusive).
+
 
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