>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> writes:
Russ> That said, I tend to be hyper-conservative and nit-picky about Russ> things like this, accurately representing copyright years Russ> isn't in my top thousand things I want people to work on in Russ> Debian, and I'm highly dubious that it will ever matter or Russ> anyone will ever care. So I'm very open to being told I'm Russ> being much too cautious. My rationale is that debian/copyright is a summary, it's not the license text in the files. I absolutely agree we shouldn't go change people's actual copyright notices in the files. And, I'm fairly convinced that it can never hurt us. I mean if someone came along and actually bothered to send us a legal letter, or even a strongly worded bug report as a copyright holder, we'd go use their preferred notice. What sort of damage are they going to be able to show because we listed 2009-2020 instead of 2009, 2012, 2019-2020. As a copyright holder I'd probably be more annoyed at the hyphen instead of the n-dash rather than the notice. But that's just me. But I totally understand we're well into bikeshedding here. On the compromise front, how would people feel about leaving the gap years question ambiguous in policy? That is, we clearly agree you can combine years across files, our question is whether you can insert years that appear in no file. Could we just sidestep the issue and leave that ambiguous?