On 2022-12-06 15 h 13, Russ Allbery wrote:
Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de> writes:The update-debian-copyright tag gives bad advice:N: The most recent copyright year mentioned for files in ./debian lags N: behind the year in the timestamp for the most recent changelog N: entry.This is a fully normal thing to have. You only update the copyright year for something when *you* do something relevant for copyright law (that is passing the threshold of originality) in that year.Having this tag is misleading because it’ll lead to people bumping the year because they don’t know better and just to silence lintian.Yeah, and I'm also dubious that we should be telling people how to manage their copyright notices at all. Berne explicitly doesn't require copyright notices. Some licenses require them, but I'm not aware of a license where one is required to update them with new years. Some projects use the approach of only updating the years when the files are changed; others update all years on all files every year (the FSF does this, for instance, based on legal advice from their lawyers). This doesn't feel like something Lintian should have an opinion about.
I also agree with your reasoning and I would personally be for its removal. I think we should note this was a feature requested in #949201.
As such, I've proposed a MR to make this tag experimental for now. I guess if people care about it, they can try to improve it?
https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/431 -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ pollo@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄
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