outdated legal notice in SGML docs?

On tor, 2012-05-17 at 16:48 -0400, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:

Hi!

While working on automating our PDF doc building for the website I
noticed that we seem to ship with outdated legal information in the docs.

http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

(this also matches up with:
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=blob_plain;f=COPYRIGHT;hb=HEAD)

seems to be our current licence text - however in the SGML docs we
actually have(pointer to the html generated source here):

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/LEGALNOTICE.html

which is differing in subtile ways (not mentioning the postgresql
licence but rather refering to a "licence from the university of
california") and also having different copyright year references/texts.

I removed the extra half sentence about the "license from the
university ...", which didn't really serve any purpose. I think the
rest is fine. The copyright notices don't need to be spelled exactly
the same, I think.

I think the COPYRIGHT file is wrong in that it claims UCB copyright only
until 1994.

This seems to be wrong in all branches and has the additional problem
that the Copyright year on the backbranches is always out-of-date - for
example:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/LEGALNOTICE.html

will have 2009 for 8.4.11 which was released in 2012...

any thoughts on what the correct way to fix this is?

I've fixed this in all the active back branches. The copyright tool in
src/tools/ does inform about doing these changes, but whoever does them
has apparently not read that.

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:16:41AM +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

This seems to be wrong in all branches and has the additional problem
that the Copyright year on the backbranches is always out-of-date - for
example:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/LEGALNOTICE.html

will have 2009 for 8.4.11 which was released in 2012...

any thoughts on what the correct way to fix this is?

I've fixed this in all the active back branches. The copyright tool in
src/tools/ does inform about doing these changes, but whoever does them
has apparently not read that.

I didn't think we wanted to update back branch copyright end dates
because that would effect thing like psql \copyright display, and the
risk didn't seem worth it.

Do we want back-branches updated in the future?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +

Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:16:41AM +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

I've fixed this in all the active back branches. The copyright tool in
src/tools/ does inform about doing these changes, but whoever does them
has apparently not read that.

I didn't think we wanted to update back branch copyright end dates
because that would effect thing like psql \copyright display, and the
risk didn't seem worth it.

Do we want back-branches updated in the future?

We have never done that in the past, and I don't think we should start
now. What I thought Peter was complaining about was that legal.sgml
had been missed in the *head* branch. However, a look in the git
history shows that hasn't happened since 2005, so it seems like the
current process is OK.

regards, tom lane

On tor, 2012-06-28 at 20:14 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:16:41AM +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

This seems to be wrong in all branches and has the additional problem
that the Copyright year on the backbranches is always out-of-date - for
example:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/LEGALNOTICE.html

will have 2009 for 8.4.11 which was released in 2012...

any thoughts on what the correct way to fix this is?

I've fixed this in all the active back branches. The copyright tool in
src/tools/ does inform about doing these changes, but whoever does them
has apparently not read that.

I didn't think we wanted to update back branch copyright end dates
because that would effect thing like psql \copyright display, and the
risk didn't seem worth it.

Do we want back-branches updated in the future?

I think we should update at least COPYRIGHT and doc/src/sgml/legal.sgml,
which are the most user-facing files. Updating all the source files is
probably not necessary.

On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 11:52:58PM +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

On tor, 2012-06-28 at 20:14 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 12:16:41AM +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

This seems to be wrong in all branches and has the additional problem
that the Copyright year on the backbranches is always out-of-date - for
example:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/LEGALNOTICE.html

will have 2009 for 8.4.11 which was released in 2012...

any thoughts on what the correct way to fix this is?

I've fixed this in all the active back branches. The copyright tool in
src/tools/ does inform about doing these changes, but whoever does them
has apparently not read that.

I didn't think we wanted to update back branch copyright end dates
because that would effect thing like psql \copyright display, and the
risk didn't seem worth it.

Do we want back-branches updated in the future?

I think we should update at least COPYRIGHT and doc/src/sgml/legal.sgml,
which are the most user-facing files. Updating all the source files is
probably not necessary.

OK, I updated the copyright tool to mention this for back branches.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +