Re: update-copyright

[Jim Meyering]

Reuben Thomas wrote:
> Two small niggles:
>
> 1. No option to turn off updating to the current year. I do take care
> not to add years in which I don't change files (I know that this is
> fussy), and I was just using update-copyright to compress year ranges.

There is no longer any need for that.
See http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html.
Note the final sentence:

    6.5 Copyright Notices
    ...
    To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have
    made nontrivial changes to the package. (Here we assume you’re using
    a publicly accessible revision control server, so that every revision
    installed is also immediately and automatically published.) When you add
    the new year, it is not required to keep track of which files have seen
    significant changes in the new year and which have not. It is recommended
    and simpler to add the new year to all files in the package, and be done
    with it for the rest of the year.

> 2. No way to exclude files that are under VC but not from the project.
> In my case, some autoconf-archive .m4 files.

Yes there is.  There are multiple ways.
Any rule that uses VC_LIST_EXCEPT can customize which files
are exempted via an .x-RULE_NAME file or via a Makefile
variable named "exclude_file_name_regexp--RULE_NAME".
See coreutils' cfg.mk for examples of the latter.