Fixes of copyright headers: Should we downport them?

[Andrew Haley]

On 3/26/20 3:53 PM, Volker Simonis wrote:
> 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.

Please let's not go down this rabbit hole. When we change stuff, we
have to update the copyright date. This is especially true when we
back-port patches from a file (c) Oracle dated, say, 2020 to one dated
2016. We must never take code which is copyright 2020, paste it into a
file dated 2016, and not update the copyright in the destination
file. It's easiest just to update the copyright on the file we're
patching to the current date.

-- 
Andrew Haley  (he/him)
Java Platform Lead Engineer
Red Hat UK Ltd. <https://www.redhat.com>
https://keybase.io/andrewhaley
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