On 12/02/26 08:45, Mathias Behrle wrote:
* Jonas Smedegaard: " Re: cme trick: update your copyright year entry in
debian/copyright" (Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:58:09 +0100):
Quoting Gioele Barabucci (2026-02-12 00:00:05)
On 11/02/26 19:02, Dominique Dumont wrote:
[...]
Or maybe this is the right time to reconsider whether updating the
copyright year is a meaningful activity :)
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-years/
Thanks a lot for mentioning this and providing the valuable reference.
I thought the same (and have thought it several times when routinely
bumping years in copyright notices the past month), but coulnd't recall
where I had read about it.
Having a closer look this post may be not an applicable example:
Daniel Stenberg removed the year ranges from the individual files [1], but kept
it in the main file [2]. And that's mostly what we do in d/copyright.
The reason to keep updating the date in the main license file is not
applicable to Debian and to `d/copyright`. From the linked blog post:
I decided to leave them in the main license file. Partly because this
is a file that lots of companies include in their products
This is a "life hack": a way for the cURL author to get a rough estimate
of when these companies embedded/forked cURL without having access to
the firmware or having to reverse engineer it. (Because companies are
legally required to ship and display the full text of the license in
their products.) That scenario does not really apply to Debian. (I've
never seen info from d/copyright in the "About" dialog of a car
entertainment system, but I've often seen cURL's license displayed there.)
and I have had some use of seeing the year ranges in there in the
past!
The year ranges in which a package has been modified or released can be
gathered by inspecting `d/copyright` or the Git repo history.
Regards,
--
Gioele Barabucci
