Updating copyright information

A while ago Havoc pointed out that I needed to put my copyright name/date at the top of files to which I’ve made “nontrivial” additions or modifications. Sounded like a bit of a pain; he suggested that it wasn’t urgent and it might be something I could do as I made future changes as that would probably eventually get it all covered. I thought that sounded good–but now that it has been a while I now realize that this course of action just means I continue to forget. So, I made a little script to search for files potentially missing my copyright information.

The script gets some false positives (e.g. trivial changes, plus sometimes I may have just been moving a function someone else wrote to a different file, and I’ve committed many patches for other people), and it may also miss some changes (if someone else committed a patch I wrote), but overall I found it pretty helpful in narrowing down which files to look at. It was as simple as running:

$ ./find-cvsuser-modifications.sh --missing-copyright "Elijah Newren" newren

I could also add –print-changes to get a couple of the log entries (well, truncated versions), which helps rule some of the changes out.

Now, if only it could check the actual changes and determine whether they are “non-trivial” and whether the changes were actually made by me instead of just committed by me…