I propose that GCC should allow the use of ranges of years (e.g.
1987-2012) in copyright notices on source files. As described at
<http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html>:
* This requires a notice in README about the use of range notation; I
propose such a notice below.
* It is not necessary to track the modification dates of individual files,
only the package as a whole; as there have been public GCC releases or
public version control in each year from 1987 onwards, the form
<first-year>-2012 is OK for all GCC source files (whose source is in GCC
rather than being copied from another package) as long as <first-year> is
1987 or later.
Comments? GDB and glibc already make active use of ranges (as does the
Ada front end in GCC). I think it's a useful cleanup to convert source
files to the <first-year>-2012 form, and to set up automatic updates of
all files at the start of the year so people don't need to care about
copyright notice updates for the rest of the year, but don't plan to work
on these things myself. (gnulib has a script that can help with both of
those things. glibc has been converting individual files to the single
range form whenever the dates needed updating to include 2012, but may do
a general bulk conversion later.)
2012-06-30 Joseph Myers <jos...@codesourcery.com>
* README: Document use of ranges of years in copyright notices.
Index: README
===================================================================
--- README (revision 189094)
+++ README (working copy)
@@ -15,3 +15,8 @@
version of the manual is in the files gcc/doc/gcc.info*.
See http://gcc.gnu.org/bugs/ for how to report bugs usefully.
+
+Copyright years on GCC source files may be listed using range
+notation, e.g., 1987-2012, indicating that every year in the range,
+inclusive, is a copyrightable year that could otherwise be listed
+individually.
--
Joseph S. Myers
jos...@codesourcery.com
