As far as I have seen, basically any PR opened always uses the following line of code on changed files:
* Copyright 20XY-2021 the original author or authors.
I think it is unnecessary and error prone to do that manually for each file on its own.
There are for example files in the projects, where the copyright only ranges from 2014-2017, meaning they were not updated at all in those 4 years since, which seems unintended when other files claim copyright until 2021.
All that work should be easily automatable by simply defining one cron job that is run annually,
i.e. on Jan 01 of each year (1 1 1 1 * in cron terminology), using sed on all project files (of course, that requires a UNIX inspired OS like a Linux distro).
The cron job could even, if configured correctly, directly commit the changes and push them on GitHub.
Comment From: michael-o
Why? Copyright notices denote the year of the first edition and years of update. If you don't change a file, no need to update the year also.
Comment From: delvh
That is one way to look at it. The other way would be to have every file be copyrighted until the last year in which any file of the project was updated. With the first way, I agree that a cron job would not be useful. With the second way, it wouldn't be so confusing: What is the purpose of having some files being copyrighted for another 50 years while some could have already expired from being copyrighted? (Sorry, I don't know copyright law that closely, that's only an estimate based on my understanding)
Comment From: delvh
As there is no progress foreseeable regarding this issue, I'm closing it here.