Developers of Sympa

[Guillaume Rousse <address@concealed>]

Hello.

As you may have noticed, I spent some efforts in making the whole set of 
perl modules the more visually consistent as possible, using uniform 
formatting templates. This include for instance removing tautological 
comments as 'this is the constructor', or 'all perl modules should 
return 1', which usually just bring noise without relevant information, 
or making all files use the same svn keyword substitution mechanism. 
They are two additional pieces of information I'd like to clear, but as 
they are a bit more sensible, I'd like some mutual decision first.

Despite usual advices from the FSF zealots, I'm very sceptic of the 
interest of duplicating a whole block of legal information in every file 
of a single application. Especially if this leads to outdated 
information, as the FSF adress isn't valid anymore, and the copyright 
years don't go past 2001. Duplication, as usual, leads to maintainance 
nightmare.

The same is true for the authors list: do we really need a file-specific 
author list, and if so, how do we handle refactoring, where content is 
moved between files ?

So, I suggest to clear those lines, and instead use a single block at 
the end of each file, such as:

=head1 AUTHORS, LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This file is part of Sympa project, see project documentation for 
details about authors, license and copyright.

This is not just a cosmetic issue. I think than being able to read a 
module description directly when opening it in a text editor, without 
having first to skip a whole lot of useless stuff such as a warranty 
denial, helps understanding its purpose at first glance.
--
Guillaume Rousse
INRIA, Direction des systèmes d'information
Domaine de Voluceau
Rocquencourt - BP 105
78153 Le Chesnay
Tel: 01 39 63 58 31

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