Re: [PATCH RFC] Update/correct copyright notices

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at is dot elta dot co dot il>]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Kevin Buettner wrote:

> This one was very puzzling to me at first.  Errors such as these were
> starting me to doubt the efficacy of the script!  But in each case,
> the ChangeLog files are in error.
> 
> For the 2001-02-10 change, I see this ChangeLog entry:
> 
> 2000-02-10  Peter Schauer  <pes@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de>
> 
> 	* mipsread.c (read_alphacoff_dynamic_symtab):  Replace alloca calls
> 	with xmalloc calls and cleanups.
> 
> This *does* appear in the current ChangeLog file so it's obvious that
> Peter meant 2001.  I think this ChangeLog entry ought to be fixed
> especially since it's in the current ChangeLog.
> 
> As to the dropping of 1998, I see the following ChangeLog entry:
> 
> 1998-10-13  Jason Molenda  (jsm@bugshack.cygnus.com)
> 
> 	...
> 
> 	* ax-gdb.c breakpoint.c coffread.c corelow.c dbxread.c
>  	dwarf2read.c dwarfread.c elfread.c eval.c exec.c infcmd.c infrun.c
>  	mipsread.c nlmread.c os9kread.c parse.c printcmd.c symfile.c
>  	symmisc.c symtab.c thread.c top.c tracepoint.c typeprint.c
>  	valops.c: Cast parameters passed to make_cleanup to use the new
>  	make_cleanup_func typedef.
> 
> The script regarded this list of files as a sentence instead of a
> file list because they're not comma separated.  I'm still mulling
> this one over and may think of a way to change my script to accomodate
> this type of error.  (It's likely that it occurs elsewhere too.)

If we are going to rely on ChangeLog's for something that affects
source files, we had better routinely check and fix any invalid
entries such as the one above.  I don't think it's right for the
script to deal with such breakage: it is too dangerous.

> > gdb/nindy-share/* is problematic.  Changelog-1993 says:
> > 
> >   * nindy-share/*, remote-nindy.c: Extensive hacking to make it
> >     conform to GDB conventions like using memcpy not bcopy, serial.h,
> >     etc.  This is to make it host on Solaris, AIX, etc.
> > 
> > ... so these files will need hand analysis.
> > 
> > I grepped for '\/\*' in ChangeLog-* and ChangeLog and found some more
> > instances of this.   I recomend hand-checking for this problem in a
> > subsequent task.
> 
> Yes, the use of ``*'' as a filename wildcard in ChangeLog entries is
> really quite annoying.  There were also entries that said foo.[hc] or
> sometimes {foo,bar}.c (or sometimes a combination of the two), but I
> was able to handle these cases.

These are all invalid entries, they go against standards.texi.  We
should simply fix them by hand, I think.