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[cross-project-issues-dev] Fix Copyrights vs. Advanced Fix Copyrights

Hi all,

as the Europa release is getting closer and closer, it will be
time sometime soon to make a pass over the copyright comments 
in the source files, in order to ensure they are there and the
copyright year is updated in case the file was changed in 2007.

You'll certainly all know that the releng.tools package has two
tools for this: "Fix Copyrights" and "Advanced Fix Copyrights".
You get the releng.tools package from any Eclpse Platform Download
page, its near the end of that page.

Since I didn't really find documentation what the two alternative
copyright tools do, and what's the difference between them, I
went and looked at the source code. Find below what I found out.
I'm E-Mailing this to this group for the following reasons:

1. If anybody knows about real documentation of this,
   please let me know!
2. If anybody has a "how-to" explaining how to best do the 
   copyright pass, please let me know!
3. If nobody knows, I hope what I found out is helpful for the
   group as a whole.

I know that it's not necessarily time yet to really do the 
copyright pass, but I thought that perhaps we'll come up 
with some enhancement requests to the tool itself, such 
that it can be improved or fixed until the time we'll 
really need it (some time around June 28 I guess [just
kidding] :-).

So, here is what I think I found out:

* Fix copyrights
  - Does not use Preferences, uses all hard-coded IBM values
  - only processes copyrights where IBM Corp is on the copyright line
  + Works on .java, .properties, .c, .sh, .bat files
  + Always writes a default ibm copyright text in default format
    - i.e. adds the "and others" string if not there
    - fixes the number of *# characters
    - Changes "Initial Contributors" --> "Contributors"
  + processes Contributors specially
  + Available on Resource and PDE perspectives
  --> Should be renamed to "Fix IBM Copyrights" ?

* Advanced Fix Copyrights
  + Uses the information from the Copyright Preference page
  - Works on .java, .properties files only
  + Adds initial copyrights as per the template if necessary
  - If a comment is already there, only looks for comments which
    have the company name according to the Preference Template
    (Doesn't even do CVS lookups if different than template)
  + Available on Resource perspective only
  - Might remove a copyright owner (IBM in this case) if you have a
String like:
    Copyright (c) 2006, 2007 IBM Corporation, Wind River Systems, Inc.
and others.

Here is what I've been recommending to my group for the
non-IBM copyrights:
1. One member of every participating company to do it
   for their respective company's copyrights
2. With releng.tools installed, go to Window > Preferences
   > Copyright, and enter the default copyright for 
   (name-your-company).
3. Then switch to Resource Perspective and do Right-click 
   > Advanced Fix Copyrights.
   You can do it for ALL the projects since it will look
   at copyrights matching your template only.
4. Using Team > Synchronize, verify that it did not do
   any harm to the copyrights.

And here is my initial enhancement request:
1. Make "Advanced Fix Copyrights" work on more file types

Cheers,
--
Martin Oberhuber
Wind River Systems, Inc.
Target Management Project Lead, DSDP PMC Member
http://www.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm


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