Re: Making copyright holders easier to parse

From: James E. King III (jking_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-07-28 13:10:54

On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 9:44 PM Giovanni Mascellani via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> I hope these examples illustrate my intention. I think that having more
> easily parsable copyright holders could be useful for Debian, for Boost
> and for Boost adopters which should properly care about the licensing of
> the libraries they use.
>

Not a huge fan of the HTTP header syntax for copyright statements.
Everyone has their own style as you can see.  I always use:

Copyright (C) YYYY - YYYY James E. King III

In the examples shown, the ability to parse the original exists:

A) Indication of a copyright,
B) A year or a year range (YYYY, YYYY-YYYY, YYYY - YYYY,
    "YYYY, YYYY - YYYY, YYYY, ...")
C) An optional copyright symbol
D) One or more names

All four sections are easily defined by allowed character content
and/or keyword.  Does "bcp" identify the files that it finds a
"?opyright" statement in but cannot parse?  Why not just fix those?
Given we already have one (or more) regular expressions to find this
information, how about adding Mergeable as a GitHub app to our
repositories and adding a condition for a successful PR so things do
not degrade?

- Jim