Making copyright holders easier to parse

From: Giovanni Mascellani (gio_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-07-27 01:36:19

Dear Boost developers,

I am one of the Debian developers maintaining the Boost package in
Debian. As part of packaging policy, we want the copyright status of
each file in Debian packages to be documented, which includes at least
the name of the copyright holders and the license of that particular
file. As you can believe, this is rather complicated for Boost, since
there are a lot of files with many copyright holders.

I started to use the tool bcp, which among other things is able to
collect such copyright information. My clone is available here[1].
However, bcp often is confused by the inconsistent style of how
copyright holders are listed in different files, so it required a lot a
manual fixing. For example, sometimes copyright years are written before
the name, sometimes after, sometimes they're absent; names are sometimes
separated by commas, sometimes by newlines, maybe even sometimes by
nothing. Sometimes there are spelling mistakes or casing inconsistencies
between names, or inconsistent institutions' names. Bcp has some
complicated regular expression to overcame all these differences, but
the result is brittle at its best.

 [1] https://salsa.debian.org/gio/boost-copyright

Since I am doing this manual work anyway, I might as well update the
Boost files so that their copyright headers are more consistent and easy
to parse, and then I could submit you patches for having them fixed in
the Boost official repositories.

My question is: are you interested in this kind of patches? Of course I
would still go through the ordinary patch submission procedure. I am
just asking if this kind of patches would be well received or not.

To better illustrate what I mean, let me consider a few examples (the
chosen files are completely random); file
libs/log/include/boost/log/exceptions.hpp currently has:

> /*
>  *          Copyright Andrey Semashev 2007 - 2015.
>  * Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
>  *    (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>  *          http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>  */

I might change this to:

> /*
>  * Copyright: 2007-2015 Andrey Semashev
>  * License: Boost Software License, Version 1.0
>  * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>  * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>  */

File libs/atomic/include/boost/atomic/fences.hpp has:

> /*
>  * Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
>  * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>  * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>  *
>  * Copyright (c) 2011 Helge Bahmann
>  * Copyright (c) 2013 Tim Blechmann
>  * Copyright (c) 2014 Andrey Semashev
>  */

I might change this to:

> /*
>  * Copyright: 2011 Helge Bahmann
>  * Copyright: 2013 Tim Blechmann
>  * Copyright: 2014 Andrey Semashev
>  * License: Boost Software License, Version 1.0
>  * (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
>  * http://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)
>  */

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.

Thank you, Giovanni.
-- 
Giovanni Mascellani <g.mascellani_at_[hidden]>
Postdoc researcher - Université Libre de Bruxelles