Fixes of copyright headers: Should we downport them?

[Volker Simonis]

Gil Tene <gil at azul.com> schrieb am Do., 26. März 2020, 08:08:

>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Mar 25, 2020, at 11:26 PM, Aleksey Shipilev <shade at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 3/19/20 4:39 PM, Lindenmaier, Goetz wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> There are a row of changes fixing copyrights downported by Oracle to
> 11.0.8,
> similar to this one:
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8220414
>
> See also
> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/issues/?filter=38639
>
> I'd consider them pretty pointless given the rules you set.
> So should we skip them?
> If so, I would mark them all as openjdk-na.
> (In my opinion we should downport them, but I'll follow
> your advice.)
>
> Not Andrew, but I believe copyright headers are important enough to
> consider for backports. If the
> reverse was true, we would not care about rejected hunks in copyright
> lines during the normal backports.
>
> Umm...
>
> It literally says ”DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE
> HEADER.”
>
> So unless we are copying the entire file from upstream
> intact (replacing the entirety of the old copyrighted file
> in 11u with a new copyrighted file copied from upstream),
> I don’t think anyone other than Oracle should be messing
> with the existing Oracle copyright notice text in 11u code.
>
> And if we do replace the file in its entirety (and e.g. the only
> difference between the two is the copyright text) we’d likely
> want the change records to indicate a removal of the old file
> and an addition of a new replacement file, and not just a
> change of the one or two lines of copyright text that differed
> between the two.
>
> If you can get Oracle to do the backport of the copyright
> changes to 11u, that’s fine. But otherwise, I’d leave them
> as they are.
>
> I know this may seem pedantic, but copyrights and notices
> matter, and they carry a lot of implications. We all depend
> on the code in the updates projects not messing with them.
>

Yes, I think you're opinion is overly pedantic :)

But maybe you're right. In that case however, the established rule that
every developer has to update the copyright year in every file touched by
his change has to be revised as well.

And, as already mentioned by Aleksey, it is not clear to me how to handle
arbitrary downports which among other things also change the copyright year
if you are right that only Oracle is allowed to do that.