Installing 'update-copyright' on PQM

[John Arbash Meinel]

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>> 4) We currently try to handle Copyright lines manually, and we are doing
>>   a pretty poor job of it. While there are some edge-cases that
>>   update-copyright gets wrong, it gets *far more* main cases correct
>>   than we've been doing ourselves.
> 
> I agree with that too.
> 
> Looking at the actual bzr-update-copyright code, I see it actually
> walks back through the history of the file and makes a copyright line
> that mentions every time it changed.  This is a useful function but
> not what I would expect to have happen in a pre commit hook.  I would
> expect if I'm committing in 2010, then if that year is already in the
> copyright line, do nothing, otherwise add it to what's already there.
> The "guess what the copyright should be" should be a separate manually
> invoked function IMO.
> 

So the reason I did this is because we have a many-year history of
getting the copyright line wrong. So it seems reasonable to push for it
to become correct, and avoid artificially adding this year to everything.

Certainly we could do what you say, and have a single run of "ignore
this year, but add everything else", and then a separate update that
triggers whenever a file is modified.

I don't really see that as being particularly more correct than the
existing code, though.

John
=:->


> This might account for why update-copyright sometimes seems to be
> "fighting" with what ought to be compatible changes.
> 
> Arguably what we want is a copyright-conflict resolver not an automatic update.
> 
> So overall:
>   * +1 to automatically broadening copyright to avoid conflicts
>  * -0.5 to deploying this particular algorithm into pqm
>  * +1 to getting news_merge into pqm
> 

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