On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 10:58 AM, Joseph S. Myers <jos...@codesourcery.com> wrote: > 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.)
IBM's policy specifies a comma: <first year>, <last year> and not a dash range. - David
