I think RAT adds, but doesn't replace. It's certainly useful for verifying that they are correct over time though.
IntelliJ CE contains a very handy copyright/license header updater that I generally use. There is also this: http://mojo.codehaus.org/license-maven-plugin/. Even if you don't use Maven, it should be feasible to run it. I've only used that to add headers, not update them, though it has the capability. Of course in both cases, it's important to review the changes to make sure there's nothing unexpected - but the tools should make the workload much lighter :) Cheers, Brett On 02/06/2012, at 1:46 PM, David Nalley wrote: > Hi folks, > > If you are looking to get started helping to move CloudStack along > towards our initial Apache release, but are still unfamiliar, I have a > great project you can help with. Part of the ASF's legal guidelines > [1] require that we have a very specific notice in the header of each > source file, and remove any copyright notices from submitted code. > RAT[2] has a function that will automatically do this, and I seem to > recall seeing a perl script for this, but can no longer locate it. A > good rule of thumb for this is that any file that currently has a > copyright notice listing Citrix Systems, Cloud.com, or VMOps as the > copyright holder is a target for this. Please do carefully check - I > have found some files bearing a Citrix or Cloud.com copyright that > also have another copyright holder listed - and this is almost always > incorrect, for any case you find like that, please file a bug as it > will need deeper inspection. > > I'd like for any interested folks to volunteer here on the list and > claim a directory in the source repo that they want to work on and > then submit patches back to the mailing list. I'd like to have this > done in a couple of weeks, with some frequent status updates. I know > this is boring and mind numbing, but it's necessary for us to move > forward. > > I'll start by claiming the UI directory. > > --David > > [1] http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html#headers > [2] http://incubator.apache.org/rat/apache-rat-core/index.html -- Brett Porter [email protected] http://brettporter.wordpress.com/ http://au.linkedin.com/in/brettporter http://twitter.com/brettporter
