Re: announce-gen: Fix copyright year in --version output.

[Collin Funk]

Hi Simon,

Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org> writes:

> That's better, but doesn't all this just hides the problem that 'make
> update-copyright' doesn't bump the copyright for these two files?  I
> think the policy is to bump copyright year to 2025 as soon as possible
> after 2025-01-01 even if there are no other changes (which would bump
> $VERSION) since we publish the file via git.  If we use your patch here,
> that wouldn't happen until some change is made that bumps $VERSION,
> which seems wrong.
>
> I think this patch should be reverted, and gnulib's 'make
> update-copyright' should be teached to update this file too.  What do
> you think?  Do you want to propose a patch to it?

Maybe, I am misreading but I think using $VERSION makes more sense
according to the GNU Coding Standards [1]:

    This copyright notice only needs to mention the most recent year in
    which changes were made—there’s no need to list the years for previous
    versions’ changes.

The useless-if-before-free script I updated recently to account for
nullptr in C23. And I know that announce-gen has been updated since
2022. Does updating the copyright header count as a change?

If your method is preferred then maybe I can add a second pass to
update-copyright to check for variables named COPYRIGHT_YEAR:

    # Perl
    my $COPYRIGHT_YEAR = '2024';
    our $COPYRIGHT_YEAR = '2024';
    # Shell
    COPYRIGHT_YEAR='2024'

Thoughts?

P.S. Also does pushing to git update the $VERSION variable for you? I
thought that was done through saving the file in Emacs. Or manually for
non-Emacs users.

Collin

[1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#g_t_002d_002dversion