Re: [gentoo-dev] Are "Copyright 1999-20xx Gentoo Foundation" headers bogus?

[Matthias Maier]

> Well, depending on how this is done the main harm is in administrative
> overhead, unless this is automated, or we use a simplistic approach of
> just continuing to append names.

The pragmatic approach would be to remove the policy and associated
repoman warning and allow contributors to use an alternative copyright
line instead. We could provide a "I don't care" skeleton of the form:

  # Copyright 1999-2016 Gentoo developers and contributors
  # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
  # Author(s): John Doe <johndoe@g.o>, ...

(with, or without the Author(s) line)

A modified repoman check could enforce a layout of the form

  # Copyright XXXX-XXXX [...]
  # Distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2
 [# Author(s): [...]]


We don't have to modify all existing ebuilds to do that. Alternatively,
we can simply change all headers to

  # Copyright 1999-2016 Gentoo developers and contributors

(if the Gentoo Foundation is OK with the few ebuilds were it holds a
copyright ^^).


Best,
Matthias