Re: RFC: one more question about year ranges in copyright notices...

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012, Pedro Alves wrote:

> That said, it may be worth asking the FSF.

Yes, that may make sense.

The rule for including intermediate years (before the rule that you can 
just add the new year to every file) used to be that the years to list 
were when a version, later released, was completed.  It then changed to 
explain that you should add the new year - on the presumption that you 
have public version control so that every intermediate version is 
released, and with the rule that you only need to track when changes to 
the whole package were made, not individual files.

Since GDB's version control history does not include the real history for 
older years - just imported snapshots / releases - it should probably be 
checked that there were indeed released versions of GDB that were 
completed in each year before 1999 that we wish to include implicitly in 
the simplified ranges.  And it probably is worth checking with the FSF 
that using <first-year>-2012 is correct in that case, and for what 
<first-year> should be (my guess is that it's the first year in which a 
released version of GDB included any copyrightable content from which the 
file was derived, but maybe it will be OK just to put the first year for 
GDB everywhere).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com