commit c0efce94dbcaa24395a1b2284aaea288c86247dd
Author: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
Date:   Tue Jan 3 12:41:50 2012 +0400

    [README] Add not about copyright and license notices
    
    Also explain the use of year ranges in copyright notices.
    
    gdb/ChangeLog:
    
            * README (Copyright and License Notices): New section.

diff --git a/gdb/README b/gdb/README
index d79fecc..501bb65 100644
--- a/gdb/README
+++ b/gdb/README
@@ -638,6 +638,28 @@ testsuite `standalone', without it being part of the GDB source tree.
 
 See the DejaGNU documentation for further details.
 
+
+Copyright and License Notices
+=============================
+
+Most files maintained by the GDB Project contain a copyright notice
+as well as a license notice, usually at the start of the file.  The
+copyright notice should list all the years during which nontrivial
+changes have been made to that file.
+
+To reduce the length of copyright notices, consecutive years in the
+copyright notice can be combined into a single range.  For instance,
+the following list of copyright years...
+
+    1986, 1988, 1989, 1991-1993, 1999, 2000, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
+
+... is abbreviated into:
+
+    1986, 1988-1989, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2007-2011
+
+Such ranges are used when nontrivial changes were made to that file
+each and every year in the range (inclusive).
+
 
 (this is for editing this file with GNU emacs)
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