[darcs-devel] [patch704] replace copyright message with module doc

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Ganesh Sittampalam writes:

 > If we really do need to keep them up to date, the practical effect will
 > a developer like me spending quite a bit of time on sorting them out
 > now, at the expense of doing something with a more immediate benefit.
 > 
 > Given that cost, can we afford to do without them?

That's a value judgment, that I can't really make for the project.

As a matter of ongoing effort, it's really not very costly.  Many
projects do it, even though there's little benefit (ie, the project
uses very permissive licensing).

Getting to the point where the existing code base is "copyright clean"
enough to make ongoing effort small indeed is costly.  (It's somewhat
amenable to scripting, to the extent the information can be extracted
from "$VCS annotate" -- "$VCS log" isn't good enough because (a) it
might be a deletion and (b) it may get cancelled by a later deletion
-- you actually have to look at the code.)  But it has a few
(relatively speculative) advantages.

If you ever want to move to GPL 3, you'll not only need to sort out
this information, but you'll also have to contact those folks.  Been
there, done that, and even though XEmacs had a pretty clean code base
in that respect, just getting to the point where we knew who to
contact took long enough for some files to drain a lot of enthusiasm
for GPL v3, despite the "big carrot" of 5 years of GNU Emacs code ripe
for the cherrypicking.

There's also the question of how important ease of reuse is to you.
If Darcs has no code reusable in other projects (I mean, because it's
so special-purpose), no problem.  If nobody in the project would be
willing to relicense their code on anything but what it says in the
headers, no problem.  But one of my own commits had to be tracked back
through two other projects to find original authors because the actual
authors were missing in the header ("yeah, I contributed that file
... but I stole half the code from over there...).  VCS probably makes
that easier, but not necessarily -- the file may not have been
transmitted via any VCS, as in my case.

Finally, Emacs has a policy of not having authors, only copyright
holders (ie, normally only the FSF) in the headers.  I hate that! :-)
It makes me feel like Emacs is owned by some giant corporation. :-P
Seeing the authors' names is important to me, especially when it turns
out that I know them from somewhere else and later realize they're
contributors to "my" project, too, or I've respected them for the
quality of their XEmacs contributions and someday get to meet them in
person.

Maybe there's a Darcs person who's into genealogies.  This is sort of
like that -- they might enjoy the archaeology! :-)