PACKAGE_YEAR

[Ralf Hemmecke]

I would lke to avoid editing the website data (for example, the year and
version on the page

https://fricas.github.io/citation.html

and also year in the copyright notice

© Copyright 2007-2025, FriCAS Team.

that appears at the bottom of the pages. While the version can be
extracted from configure.ac, and I have already implemented that, but I
am not sure where I get the year from. Of course I cannot use the date
of compilation since the website should be reproducible. Using the git
commit date would be possible, but may not be available if the sources
are distributed without the .git directory.

Does anyone know where I can reliably get the year/date of the release from?

Ralf

[Waldek Hebisch]

I do not think that we have year anywhere. It seems that citation.html
is the only place which uses it. AFAIK there are projects which
on January 1 run scripts that bump year in copyright notices, but
IIUC this is legally wrong: one is supposed to change year only
when there are copyrightable changes to affected piece. New release
almost surely will contain such changes, but I do not think that
automation can decide this. Basically, release needs to be
manually triggered at at that time we can bump the year.

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Ralf Hemmecke]

>> Does anyone know where I can reliably get the year/date of the release from?

> I do not think that we have year anywhere. It seems that citation.html
> is the only place which uses it. AFAIK there are projects which
> on January 1 run scripts that bump year in copyright notices, but
> IIUC this is legally wrong: one is supposed to change year only
> when there are copyrightable changes to affected piece. New release
> almost surely will contain such changes, but I do not think that
> automation can decide this. Basically, release needs to be
> manually triggered at at that time we can bump the year.

Well, it's about the website. I think that it makes sense to show the
copyright year of the release on the website. No matter what changes are
done to the .rst files. The website is a statement about the whole
FriCAS project.

Anyway, of course, we can manually change/set the year in
src/doc/sphinx/source/conf.py before any release.

However, since you are anyway going to change configure.ac, I think it
would be a better place there to define a variable for example
PACKAGE_YEAR (or whatever) and then substitute it into the Makefile's.
That would mean only one file to change before the release.

Ralf