Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] bug in type-validation for "deprecated" declaration

[Peter Bex]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 04:22:02PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Generalized rant, not specific to this case:
> 
> There is simply no point in updating copyright dates any more when a file
> is modified.  When you put the copyright notice on a new file, give it
> the current year and otherwise forget it.  Copyrights expire 50-70 years
> after the death of the copyright owner, and a century and more from now,
> nobody will *care* exactly when the document falls into the public domain.

I don't do it so much about the copyright but for the fact that people
can see that stuff has been updated.  When the first thing you see when
opening a file is "(C) 1994" a gut reaction is to presume it hasn't been
touched since that year.  And when you see "(C) 2008-2011" in the banner
of csi, you'd think you're running an older version.  This is especially
true for people unfamiliar with the project.  It also helps give a general
idea of the project's activity and a rough idea when a release was made
without having to look at any "external" information.

I'm not sure we should put a copyright statement at the top of every
single file (that's what LICENSE is for).  I've taken to only doing it
at the top of the "main" module file for my newer eggs.  OTOH, what we
have now works fine and is common practice.

> This is an actual policy at Google, and I'm trying to spread it around.

We're not Google.

> > AFAIK the only bug we have open is #916; lolevel-tests fails on
> > Linux/MacPPC.
> 
> I haven't filed a bug, but the Cygwin test failures are ominous.

Yeah, that's rather worrying.  I think this needs to be addressed before
making a release, unless we intend to drop support for Cygwin (in this
release).

Cheers,
Peter
-- 
http://sjamaan.ath.cx
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