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Re: [DEP5] Format of Copyright header



Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> I noticed in reviewing another patch that the Copyright header is a
> line-based list.  One unfortunate implication of that is that this means
> lines are required to be longer than 80 columns if the name of the
> copyright holder is long.  For example:

> Copyright: 2004, 2009, 2011 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Note that while I didn't construct this quite well enough to illustrate
the problem (since a newline before the date would work in this case), add
in a few more years and you'll see the problem even in that case.

For example, I have one piece of software that has the following copyright
statement upstream:

  Copyright 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006,
  2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
  Junior University.  All rights reserved.

(Yes, it's possible upstream to collapse multiple dates into a range,
provided that one attaches an explanation of what the range means, but
many upstreams don't do that, and I like to reproduce the upstream
copyright notice verbatim.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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