Bug 380325 – app-portage/gentoolkit-dev: echangelog changes the starting year in the copyright header

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE

[Description Ulrich Müller 2011-08-23 06:31:57 UTC]

Upon updating app-misc/editor-wrapper, I've noticed that echangelog had mangled the dates in the header of files/editor-wrapper-4.sh. It had changed 2009-2011 to 1999-2011. Since the file was created from scratch in 2009, that change is clearly wrong.

For files in FILESDIR, could echangelog please leave the dates alone?

[Comment 1 Ulrich Müller 2011-08-23 06:45:56 UTC]

(In reply to comment #0)
> For files in FILESDIR, could echangelog please leave the dates alone?

s/dates/starting date/

[Comment 2 Christian Ruppert (idl0r) 2011-08-25 14:44:05 UTC]

echangelog should only change Gentoo copyrights. So we have 1999 - ... in *all* ebuilds. If something in files/ is "owned" by Gentoo, why shouldn't the copyright date be the same as in our ebuilds and other files?

[Comment 3 Ulrich Müller 2011-08-25 17:44:36 UTC]

Because a starting year of 1999 is nonsensical for a file that was created in 2009.

IANAL, but the U.S. Copyright Office says that a copyright notice should contain "the year of first publication of the work":
<http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html#401>

[Comment 4 Christian Ruppert (idl0r) 2013-05-10 20:37:31 UTC]

This should be fixed in app-portage/gentoolkit-dev-0.2.8.2. Please test.

[Comment 5 Ulrich Müller 2013-05-11 07:10:03 UTC]

Seems to work fine in 0.2.8.1 already (i.e. the ending year is increased but the starting year is left alone).

But in 0.2.8.2, I get:
$ echangelog foo
Can't use an undefined value as a symbol reference at /usr/bin/echangelog line 595, <C> line 3.

[Comment 6 Ulrich Müller 2017-11-03 07:15:23 UTC]

Closing, since echangelog and gentoolkit-dev are deprecated.