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

[Simon Josefsson]

Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Thanks for digging up the reference.  I wonder if something changed
here.  Can someone remind me why we do the 'make update-copyright'
dance?  I recall 'make syntax-check' failing when this is not done, so
maybe those self tests shouldn't be failing.

> 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?

I think so, but then again, if the policy doesn't recommend bumping
these changes yearly, maybe we should stop doing it.

> 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?

Yes, I think some special cases are handled already.

> 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.

I don't think we have any push magic for gnulib at all.  So this is
emacs magic.

/Simon

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