On 12/02/26 19:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
As someone pointed out in the comments on Daniel's blog post, US law gives special status to a valid copyright notice, which under US law must contain a date.
_A_ date. :) The starting date will still be there if you don't update it every year.
I don't believe anybody is suggesting removing all dates from the copyright statements in `d/copyright`, just stopping updating the date every year.
The advice of the Free Software Foundation, which I believe they ran past their lawyers, requires a non-trivial change but only to any part of the package. It doesn't have to be a non-trivial change to that specific file.
My reading is that the FSF is advising authors on how to deal with their own projects. If _your_ project has 10 files, any trivial change that _you_ have done to any of these files qualifies for a bump.
But what we are discussing here is the copyright on the packaging. From what I've seen, few packages change their `debian/` files in a non-trivial way after the initial packaging. And definitely not every year.
I don't believe the FSF would advise to bump the copyright year for _my_ packaging files if the files written _by the upstream developers_ have changed.
Regards, -- Gioele Barabucci
