Re: copyright statement

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello,

* Eric Blake wrote on Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 05:56:40PM CET:
> Jim Meyering writes:
> 
> > Simon beat me to it with the first part, so this makes
> > only the latter change:
> > 
> >  build-aux/compile           |    2 +-
> 
> Yet another upstream change that needs to be pushed to automake.

Besides that, maintain.info also explicitly contains two spaces here,
which is why most of Automake's copyright headers, and those of lots of
other GNU projects, have or had these two spaces here:

     A copyright notice looks like this:

       Copyright (C) YEAR1, YEAR2, YEAR3  COPYRIGHT-HOLDER

     The COPYRIGHT-HOLDER may be the Free Software Foundation, Inc., or
  someone else; you should know who is the copyright holder for your
  package.
  [...]

I don't know if there is either legal or by-convention significance to
this, but I do remember patches to explicitly add back those two spaces
to some GNU projects.  If you want Automake to adhere to the new gnulib
convention, then please get maintain.texi changed.  And no, gnulib is
not the upstream for maintain.texi either.  ;-)

So far Automake doesn't bump all of its files' copyright notices at new
year.  If it makes the handling of shared files easier, I might be
persuaded to give that up for these files, but I don't see any point in
bumping 700+ test files header for no reason.

Cheers,
Ralf