Re: check-news target fails if NEWS file starts with a copyright header

[Jim Meyering]

Peter Simons wrote:
> the NEWS file of the GNU Autoconf Archive begins with a copyright header. As a
> result, the check-news target fails, because the output of "head ./NEWS"
> doesn't contain the release line that target is looking for.
>
> I have worked around the problem by patching maint.mk as follows:
>
>   sed -i -e 's,head $(srcdir)/NEWS,head -n 20 $(srcdir)/NEWS,' maint.mk
>
> Maybe it's worthwhile to change that in the distribution, too?

You may want to put the copyright at the end of NEWS.
Human readers prefer it that way, too ;-)

Here's what I use:

========================================================================
Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover
Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the ``GNU Free
Documentation License'' file as part of this distribution.