Sphinx: copyright substitution and reproducibility

[Bernhard M. Wiedemann]

On 09/07/2024 14.14, James Addison via rb-general wrote:
> Although I think there are reasons to prefer and encourage static (constant)
> declaration of copyright notices, many projects today do choose to use
> dynamically-evaluated values.
> 
> I doubt there's a way to solve every edge case, but I think that it should be
> possible to vastly reduce the number of clearly-incorrect copyright notice
> outputs that could occur, while retaining both backwards compatibility and also
> build reproducibility.

Using a dynamic copyright year can only produce correct results, when it 
is ensured that it is not newer than input files (and even then, 
applying a patch updates the mtime of input files).

E.g. when using current year as copyright, today's software/docs 
re-built in 9 months, will show Copyright 2025, which is clearly 
incorrect, as nobody did anything copyright-worthy in 2025 in that version.

IMHO, the correct solution is to use static copyright year. Or none at all.
In many places, copyright is valid until 50-70 years after the death of 
its author. [1]
So you only need to update the year every few decades, when you do changes.


Ciao
Bernhard M.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Duration