[FFmpeg-devel] PATCH: change cmdutils.c so the copyright year does not need changing every year

[JULIAN GARDNER]

----- Original Message -----
> From: Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de>
> To: FFmpeg development discussions and patches <ffmpeg-devel at ffmpeg.org>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Tuesday, 27 September 2011, 21:46
> Subject: Re: [FFmpeg-devel] PATCH: change cmdutils.c so the copyright year does not need changing every year
> 
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 08:56:19PM +0100, JULIAN GARDNER wrote:
>>  Trivial patch, was looking into why when i build a new ffmpeg the 
> "build time" did not change, and found this so thought i would make a 
> simple patch, should work until 31-12-9999
> 
> I don't think this is a good idea.
> First, it would give bogus results if the build machine has a broken
> date.
> Second, it's just plain wrong. It is not okay for it to increase
> automatically if for example no changes happened at all in that year.
> In particular I wouldn't want to promise that this could not
> (theoretically at least) create legal trouble.

But in theory if NO CODE CHANGES then this file wont be recompiled and the date wont be changed.

And the reason behind this is that unless you modify this file or do a clean build the build message has the wrong date and time, which is the reason i started looking into this, as i had a build on a machine whch had a build time which differed from my build machines build time.

So i do think this is better then someone having to remember to go into this file the 1st time a change is made and change it to the correct year.

And a better idea would be that the makefile always compiles a small file so that every change causes the build time to be updated, which is what i have in my work projects, something called revision.c which has the following

const char *builtOn = __TIME__ " on " __DATE__;
const char *revisionNumber = "0.000000";

The revision is updated again by the build script so ANY modification causes a new revision number, so we can track each modification and release

joolz