ess/debian/copyright

[Martin Maechler]

(To both ess-debian and ess-core)

Nothing urgent, but since debian-maintenance of ESS has now
caught up so nicely ..

I haven't checked who is responsible for which part of the
copyright file, and I must admit that I am usually not much
interested in these things, but
when I've browsed the ess/debian/ files this morning,
I have been slightly irritated by seeing the years in this part

Copyright (C) 2004 - 2008 Martin Maechler 
Copyright (C) 1994 - 2004 A.J. Rossini
Copyright (C) 1994 - 2008 Richard M. Heiberger <rmh at temple.edu>,
Copyright (C) 1994 - 2008 Kurt Hornik <kurt.hornik at R-project.org>,
Copyright (C) 1994 - 2008 Rodney A. Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu>,
Copyright (C) 1994 - 2008 Stephen Eglen <stephen at gnu.org>

How where these year ranges determined ?

Tony has not stopped being an ess developer, just being the
"project leader".
I know that I have been hacking for "S-mode" (as it was called
back then) already in the very early nineties, I think before Tony
consolidated S-mode with other "stat-prog" modes into ESS around 1994.
Also, Stephen, now being a very prominent ESS core member, has
definitely not been in ESS core in the 90s.

Further, a quick 'grep Bates *.el' in the lisp/ subdirectory
yielded

ess-help.el:;; Copyright (C) 1989-1994 Bates, Kademan, Ritter and Smith
ess-inf.el:;; Copyright (C) 1989-1994 Bates, Kademan, Ritter and Smith
ess-mode.el:;; Copyright (C) 1989-1994 Doug Bates, Ed Kademan, Frank Ritter, David Smith.
ess-trns.el:;; Copyright (C) 1989--1994 Bates, Kademan, Ritter and Smith
ess.el:;; Copyright (C) 1989--1996 Bates, Kademan, Ritter and Smith
ess.el:;; Original Authors: Doug Bates, Ed Kademan, Frank Ritter, David Smith
essl-s.el:;; Copyright (C) 1989-1997 D. Bates, Kademan, Ritter, D.M. Smith, K. Hornik,

where the context of the last one is

;; Copyright (C) 1989-1997 D. Bates, Kademan, Ritter, D.M. Smith, K. Hornik,
;;	R.M. Heiberger, M. Maechler, and A.J. Rossini.

and there are more copyrights of earlier authors in SAS mode
etc. All of these had agreed in the past to donate their lisp
code to ESS.

----------------------------

And yes, ESS-core has not been extremely diligent in keeping the
copyright year ranges uptodate in the many *.el files,
but we have typically had all ESS-core members 
share the same year-range for the main (latest) (C) statement,
and we typically *have* added the current years to files when changed.

Maybe a pragmatic approach would be to do the same thing
in the debian/copyright file, i.e. just change Tony's and my
entry to match the others  ?

Martin