Re: [PATCH] maint: add a rule to use gnulib's update-copyright

[Jim Meyering]

Stefano Lattarini wrote:
...
>> I propose to push the result of doing this:
>>
>>   $ git ci -m 'maint: run "make update-copyright"' -a
>>   [maint aafc6b5] maint: run "make update-copyright"
>>    1041 files changed, 1041 insertions(+), 1266 deletions(-)
>>
> Hmm...  It now occurs to me that, if we apply such a change to maint,
> we risk to incur in a lot of spurious merge conflicts when merging
> maint back to the active branches, since the copyright lines of
> several files in such branches have been modified in the meantime
> (in particular, in master, the copyright line of *all* the test
> cases has been modified in 2011).  Maybe we should just wait until
> 'yl-work-for-master' is merged back to master, and then run "make
> update-copyright" on master only?  I think this might be acceptable
> because I plan to release automake 1.12 in two or three months,
> without any further 1.11.x maintenance release.  WDYT?

Waiting is fine with me.
On one hand, you have the minor but continuing day-to-day
update-individual-copyright-or-not hassle, and on the other,
you have a one-time (but higher-cost) penalty per branch merge.