ess/debian/copyright

Sat May 24 14:57:36 CEST 2008

Hi Martin,

I would say everybody in ess-debian is. Our svn, our file. That shared
responsibility is what shared maintainership is about.  So let me thank you
for going there and trying to make it better!

| and I must admit that I am usually not much interested in these things, but

While I acknowledge that we have to deal with them, I will readily state that
I have no great interest in it either. Legal stuff is dull and boring but
unfortunately, it really matters.

| 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 ?

Look at 'svn log' for the edit history.  

I did the most recent part based on whatever information I could muster in
the sources. I also added a note for an explicit 'call for help':

   edd at ron:~/svn/ess> svn log debian/copyright
   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
   r3890 | edd | 2008-05-16 12:53:58 -0500 (Fri, 16 May 2008) | 12 lines

   - debian/copyright partially rewrittem to fit the now-current and mandated
     style of lines starting with Copyright (C) ... and License:
     ESS Core: Please correct the years if need, and add missing authors, if any
   [...]

s/need/needed/, I suppose.

| 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.

All good points. Given that you *do* have svn write access to the file, could
you please make the necessary corrections?  Also editing debian/changelog is
optional; if you have the Debian/Ubunt package dpkg-dev-el installed you get
Emacs functionality for it and C-c C-v will start a new entry.

| ----------------------------
| 
| 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  ?

Sure. Please do. Feel free to add all authors of S-mode too -- it is your
call as to whether that is 'right' or not.

I also had to (re-)write debian/copyright for R for the newly added 'Ra'
package r-base-core-ra that finally entered Debian unstable as of
yesterday. The package is based on Stephen Milborrow's patch -- as a new
package this gets extra scrutiny and I had one upload rejected because of an
insufficient debian/copyright. It is shipped as a patch to R, so
debian/copyright mostly deals with R.  Luckily I found doc/COPYRIGHTS and
src/gnuwin32/COPYRIGHTS.win which I as Debian R maintainer had been unaware
of (!!)  I will carry the changes over to Debian's R package for its
copyright and mail you a copy for inspection.  Changes and corrections most
welcome.

Thanks for looking into this.  Feel free to do it for any of the other source
packages in Debian/Ubuntu.  I am sure most if not all maintainers will
appreciate a helping hand. 

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.