Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Update ancient copyright string in QEMU -version output

[Eric Blake]

On 07/28/2016 09:24 AM, Peter Maydell wrote:
> Currently the -version command line argument prints a string ending
> with "Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard".  This is now some
> eight years out of date; abstract it out of the several places that
> print the string and update it to:
> 
> Copyright (c) 2003-2016 Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers
> 
> to reflect the work by all the QEMU Project contributors over the
> last decade.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
> ---
> The aim here is to (1) update the dates and (2) acknowledge
> the work of all our contributors. I'm open to suggestions
> on the exact wording (or on which header file we should
> put the #define in...)
> 
> I only pulled out the copyright string proper into the #define
> because a GUI About box is going to want just that, with no
> leading ',' or trailing newline.
> 
> Fabrice: I have cc'd you since this is proposing an update
> to your copyright info.
> 
>  bsd-user/main.c       | 3 ++-
>  include/qemu-common.h | 4 ++++
>  linux-user/main.c     | 2 +-
>  vl.c                  | 3 ++-
>  4 files changed, 9 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
> 

Missing at least qemu-img.c, where the dates started at 2004 instead of
2003.  I don't see any particular problem with having ALL qemu utilities
report 2003-2016, even if some of them weren't available in 2003, since
they DO share a code base with copyrights that far back.  It would also
be okay in my mind to list JUST 2016 (rather than the range 2003-2016) -
that's what utilities like GNU Coreutils do (see 'ls --version') at the
recommendation of the GNU Coding Standards (that is, code has ranged
copyrights for whenever it was touched, but binaries only need to
declare a copyright for the year it was built).0

> diff --git a/include/qemu-common.h b/include/qemu-common.h
> index 1f2cb94..9e8b0bd 100644
> --- a/include/qemu-common.h
> +++ b/include/qemu-common.h
> @@ -18,6 +18,10 @@
>  
>  #include "qemu/option.h"
>  
> +/* Copyright string for -version arguments, About dialogs, etc */
> +#define QEMU_COPYRIGHT "Copyright (c) 2003-2016 " \
> +    "Fabrice Bellard and the QEMU Project developers"

In general, I'm a definite fan of this approach, since it lets us bump
the year in a single file, rather than hunting down every binary that
needs an update.  Looking forward to v2 that covers the full list.


-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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