Re: Copyright information in source files

Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I'd like to get rid of those IDENTIFICATION lines completely (they are
> left over from the time when the project used CVS, and that section
> had a $Header$ "ident" tag, but in the git era, those ident tags are
> no longer in fashion).

I'm not for that. Arguments about CVS vs git are irrelevant: the
usefulness of those lines comes up when you've got a file that's
not in your source tree but somewhere else. It's particularly
useful for the Makefiles, which are otherwise often same-y and
hard to identify.

> There are other inconsistencies in the copyright messages, like
> whether we say "Portions" or not for PGDU, and whether we use 1996- or
> the year the file was created, and whether the Berkeley copyright is
> there or not (different people seem to have different ideas about
> whether that's needed for a post-Berkeley file).

Yeah, it'd be nice to have some greater consistency there. My own
thought about it is that it's rare to have a file that's *completely*
de novo code, and can be guaranteed to stay that way --- more usually
there is some amount of copying&pasting, and then you have to wonder
how much of that material could be traced back to Berkeley. So I
prefer to err on the side of including their copyright. That line of
argument basically leads to the conclusion that all the copyright tags
should be identical, which doesn't seem like an unreasonable rule.

regards, tom lane