emacs/admin/notes/years

HOW TO MAINTAIN COPYRIGHT YEARS FOR GNU EMACS

Maintaining copyright years is now very simple: every time a new year
rolls around, add that year to every FSF (and AIST) copyright notice.
Do this by running the 'admin/update-copyright' script on a fresh repo
checkout.  Inspect the results for plausibility, then commit them.

There's no need to worry about whether an individual file has changed
in a given year - it's sufficient that Emacs as a whole has changed.

Therefore the years are updated en-masse near the start of each year,
so basically there is no need for most people to do any updating of them.

The current (in 2011) version of "Information for Maintainers of GNU
Software" (see that document for more details) says that it is OK to use
ranges in copyright years, so in early 2011 the years were changed to use
ranges, which occupy less space and do not grow in length every year.

For more detailed information on maintaining copyright, see the file
"copyright" in this directory.

The previous policy was more complex, but is now only of historical
interest (see versions of this file from before 2009).

The refcards in etc/refcards can print only the latest copyright year,
but should keep the full list in a comment in the source.


"Our lawyer says it is ok if we add, to each file that has been in Emacs
 since Emacs 21 came out in 2001, all the subsequent years[1].  We don't
 need to check whether *that file* was changed in those years.
 It's sufficient that *Emacs* was changed in those years (and it was!).

 For those files that have been added since then, we should add
 the year it was added to Emacs, and all subsequent years."

 --RMS, 2005-07-13

[1] Note that this includes 2001 - see
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2006-12/msg00119.html>