Re: Making copyright holders easier to parse

From: Giovanni Mascellani (gio_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-07-27 18:38:40

Hi,

Il 27/07/19 10:22, Glen Fernandes ha scritto:
> +1.

Thank you for everybody's feedback, which seems to be mostly positive!

> Instead of inventing a new format now, if anything, why not make them
> consistent with https://www.boost.org/users/license.html prescribes?
> After all, many of our libraries are already consistent with it, and
> as Rene (and the page) conveys, some effort when into deciding things
> like that.
> 
> The page has the format "Copyright Joe Coder 2004 - 2006" and most
> libraries have that, or "Copyright (C) Joe Coder 2004 - 2006". Both
> are easy to parse without needing to introduce a colon after
> "Copyright:".

I wasn't actually pushing for any specific header format, sorry for not
making this clear. To me, anything that can be easily automatically
parsed is fine, including of course the one mentioned in the FAQs (which
I had not previously noticed). However, that template does not cover the
case of more than one copyright holder. Would something like this be
acceptable?

//          Copyright Joe Coder 2004 - 2006.
//          Copyright Bob Hacker 2010 - 2015.
// Copyright Department of Writing Very Long Names, Newline
//               Company Inc. 2017 - 2019.
// Distributed under the Boost Software License, Version 1.0.
//    (See accompanying file LICENSE_1_0.txt or copy at
//          https://www.boost.org/LICENSE_1_0.txt)

If not, what other?

(the thing with a very long name is not pretentious; there is already a
"Institute of Transport, Railway Construction and Operation, University
of Hanover" in Boost).

If this proposal seems appropriate for you, I can start to patch a few
files and submit them here, so that they can be evaluated more carefully
(this might not immediate, as I still have to write the code to do so).

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