Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2015 16:16:56 -0500
From: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc>,
 David Fetter <david@fetter.org>,
 Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>,
 PostgreSQL mailing lists <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Updating copyright notices to 2015 for PGDG
Message-ID: <20150106211656.GC17824@momjian.us>
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 <20150106151917.GB13684@momjian.us>
 <54AC3B8B.2020902@kaltenbrunner.cc>
 <20150106205411.GB17824@momjian.us>
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On Tue, Jan  6, 2015 at 06:12:30PM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan  6, 2015 at 08:46:19PM +0100, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
> > > > I will run the script today.  I didn't do it earlier because I want to
> > > > be current on reading community email before doing it.
> > > 
> > > hmm is it intentional that the commit also changed other files?
> > > 
> > > looks like the commited patch added newlines to various files that had
> > > none before for example:
> > 
> > Specifically, these files had no newline after the last line in the
> > file.
> 
> I don't think we have any files that require not to have a trailing
> newline.  Do we need an explicit check against it?  Seems doubtful, but
> then if the need arises, we will break it each year and who knows if
> anybody will be vigilant enough to notice.  Stefan caught it this time,
> but who would normally skim 18000 lines of supposedly mechanical diff
> looking for issues?  (How did you catch this in the first place?)

I am guessing pgindent would also add a newline, but since the spec
files aren't C files, pgindent doesn't tough them.

> This makes me wonder however how wise it is to update the copyright
> notices in every single file in the repo.  Why do we need this?  Why not
> abolish the practice and live forever with most files having copyright
> 2015?  (Only new files would have newer years in their copyright
> notices, I guess.)  Does this provide us with any kind of protection,
> and if so against what, and how does it protect us?  Since we have a
> very clean git history which shows us the exact provenance of every
> single line of source code, and we have excellent mail archives that
> show where each line came from for all development in the last decade,
> this single line of (C) boilerplate in each file seems completely
> pointless.

I think the copyright update is more of a consistency thing, rather than
something that has a legal requirement.  It is hard to see why we would
stop doing it just to preserve missing trailing newlines we don't even
know we need.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

  + Everyone has their own god. +


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