Copyright year ranges

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

On Sun, 29 Jan 2012, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

> >> We now support ranged notion for copyright years per README.
> >
> > FWIW, GDB plans to move to using the simplest copyright notice form: a
> > single range of years, <first>-2012, with the last year in the range
> > updated for all files by a script at the start of the year. ?(It was
> > confirmed in <http://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-patches/2012-01/msg00936.html>
> > that using just a single range like this is OK. ?It's been recommended
> > practice for some time to update the list of years in all files at the
> > start of the year so people don't need to worry about it for the rest of
> > the year. ?gnulib has a script for such start-of-year updates.)
> 
> This is a great idea.
> 
> Is the GNU Coding Standard going to be updated with this information?
> 
> Should we wait for the standard to get updated before we adopt this policy?

The conclusion on bug-standards was that this can be done as long as a 
release (production or beta) was made in the intermediate year, or there 
was public version control in that year.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-standards/2012-02/msg00003.html

From the ChangeLogs it appears there were glibc releases for each year 
from 1992 to 1997 at least and by 1998 there was public version control.  
So I think this means that years 1992 and later can be collapsed (subject 
to working out new ways of doing whatever was previously done using 
copyright year information), but not any years before 1992 that are 
discontiguous with each other or with the 1992 and later years.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com