On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 06:47:17PM +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote: > On Thu, 27 Feb 2014, Joel Brobecker wrote: > > > I should mention, however, that for us to use ranges like this, > > the FSF asked us to add a note explaining that the copyright years > > could be abbreviated into a range. See gdb/README (at the end). > > I suspect that you'll need the same note for binutils.
Thanks Joel. I'll copy that or the gcc wording. > And, where a gap in the years is being implicitly filled in by conversion > to a range, make sure that either (a) there was a public version control > repository for binutils during that year, or (b) there was a release > (including beta releases, Cygnus releases etc., not just official > releases) during that year. It looks like the earliest binutils files that are edited by update-copyright.py have copyright dates starting at 1985. Of those, quite a few have skipped years. eg. binutils/filemode.c is Copyright 1985, 1990,... So, CVS goes back to 1991, and there are copies of old binutils releases for all years from 1988 to 2002 except for 1999 at ftp://sourceware.org/pub/binutils/old-releases/ Joseph, do you know why implicitly adding years to the claimed copyright years is a problem? I'm guessing the file needs to be published somewhere for each year claimed. -- Alan Modra Australia Development Lab, IBM