update-copyright vs. compressed years

[Eric Blake]

In testing out the new update-copyright script on autoconf, I noticed the 
following conversion:

-Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008 Free Software
+Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008-2009 Free Software
 Foundation, Inc.

In my opinion, this looks ugly for its inconsistent style.  I would rather see 
it as either:

-Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008 Free Software
+Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 Free Software
 Foundation, Inc.

(matching the recommendations of the GNU maintainer manual), or:

-Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008 Free Software
+Copyright (C) 1996, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007-2009 Free Software
 Foundation, Inc.

(matching the compressed style preferred by coreutils).

I don't know if it is worth adding an option to update-copyright to choose 
between the two styles.  Personally, now that update-copyright is able to re-
wrap lines into sane lengths, it is no longer quite the hassle of using the 
longhand style (one of the arguments for using the compressed style was that 
emacs' update copyright hooks didn't rewrap lines, so things got unwieldy if 
you didn't touch up the results).  So far, I've been trying to follow the GNU 
maintainer recommendations and use longhand rather than compressed years when 
listing autoconf copyrights.

-- 
Eric Blake