PATCH: Update copyright year for gengtype

Gerald Pfeifer gerald@pfeifer.com
Tue Apr 18 21:08:00 GMT 2006


On Tue, 18 Apr 2006, Ben Elliston wrote:
> The copyright date I was updating is not for the version of the gen*
> programs, it is for the copyright on the output of those programs.
> Pedantically, I would imagine that the copyright on the generated code
> would have a range of years as the generated output has been changing
> over time.
> 
> In light of this, is the current year still adequate?

Steven also pointed this out in a different thread, and while this does
not seem to be covered by the GNU coding guidlines, I believe the two
of you have a very valid point.

For example, the output of bison looks like the following

  /* A Bison parser, made by GNU Bison 1.875.  */

  /* Skeleton parser for Yacc-like parsing with Bison,
     Copyright (C) 1984, 1989, 1990, 2000, 2001, 2002 Free Software 
     Foundation, Inc.

while the invocation of bison --version says

  bison (GNU Bison) 1.75
  Written by Robert Corbett and Richard Stallman.

  Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

But instead of speculating, let's ask the one person who will be able
to provide an authoritative answer. ;-)

RMS, when we have a program that generates a program in output (such
as bison or gengtype, the latter being part of GCC) should all the
relevant years be listed in the copyright statement -- as with regular
sources files -- or only the last -- as with `program --version`?

Gerald



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