Re: [ECOS] Re: eCosCentric copyright hold in headers

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl@eCosCentric.com>]

Andrew Lunn wrote:
> Should we propose what the new banner looks like?
> 
> Is the basic format of the current banner  OK?

I'd like it to be changed actually. Some of the information parts of the 
banner are _very_ frequently poorly maintained and/or inaccurate and do us 
a disservice. I think the Authors/Contributors bits are ambiguous; and the 
Purpose/Description ditto. It's never really been clear what Date the Date 
is for. I think I fill these in more than most people, but still rarely. 
Contributions very frequently have inaccurate fields here, most annoyingly 
the author.

I think something like the following fields would be better/clearer:

Maintained by: <person responsible for _this_ file, irrespective of what it 
was derived from>

Contributors: <anyone else who's worked on it and wants a mention>
Derived from: <what file/package it was derived from if relevant
Description:

I propose dropping the date entirely partly due to the ambiguity and partly 
because it doesn't tell us anything we can't find out more accurately from 
the changelogs.

I propose dropping the mini-description underneath the filename at the top, 
as it is usually no better than the description further down.

It would require some cunning script-fu to try and squeeze the content 
there now into this style as best as possible, but it would be good to do 
these types of sweeping changes that touch all files once. Of course plenty 
of the existing content is wrong too, but we can fix that piecemeal. For 
example most of the "Maintained by" headers would be filled in on a package 
-wide basis.


> --- ChangeLog   2004-04-08 16:12:54.000000000 +0200
> +++ ChangeLog.new       2004-04-08 16:17:45.000000000 +0200
> @@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
>  // -------------------------------------------
>  // This file is part of eCos, the Embedded Configurable Operating System.
>  // Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Red Hat, Inc.
> +// Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>  //
>  // eCos is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
>  // the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
> @@ -26,9 +27,6 @@
>  //
>  // This exception does not invalidate any other reasons why a work based on
>  // this file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
> -//
> -// Alternative licenses for eCos may be arranged by contacting Red Hat, Inc.
> -// at http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/ecos-license/
>  // -------------------------------------------
>  //####ECOSGPLCOPYRIGHTEND####
>  //===========================================================================
> 
> The last bit clearly wants to go since its not been true for a long
> while.

Absolutely. We just didn't want to touch every file multiple times. People 
doing "cvs update" won't like us otherwise :-).

> Should the original RedHat Copyright line be deleted as well? I guess
> leaving it could confuse people into thinking the files are still
> copyright RedHat as well as being FSF.. 

When the assignment is properly made the RH copyright _must_ disappear in fact.

I have a script that munges file headers, that was used in the RHEPL->GPL 
change and other changes before that. It's horrible as it has evolved 
piecemeal over time so it's a real hacky mess so I don't want to publicise 
it here :-). It deals with all the various comment characters ( /* */ 
versus // versus # versus ; versus dnl versus <!-- -->) and differing 
licenses though (BSD stack, host tools, etc.) IIRC.

A perl wizard may be able to do a better job quite quickly though, 
especially if we're to munge the other header fields too - this is one of 
the things perl is good at.

Jifl
-- 
eCosCentric    http://www.eCosCentric.com/    The eCos and RedBoot experts
--["No sense being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway"]-- Opinions==mine