Eclipse copyright tool

COSMOS Wiki > COSMOS Development Process

We are legally required (and also required by Eclipse guidelines) to maintain our copyrights as accurately as possible. The Eclipse repository contains a tool that will fix copyrights in your code. It will insert copyrights into any files that are missing them, and will also attempt to insert the additional year for modified files (e.g. "2007, 2009"). To do the latter, the tool compares all files against the last revision from the previous year to see if there were any changes. So even if you didn't change the file for this checkin, it might be fixing the copyright for a previous change in the current year.

Here are the steps to load and run the fix copyrights tool.

1. Load module org.eclipse.releng.tools from repository /cvsroot/eclipse on dev.eclipse.org.
2. Export the plugin to your plugins directory by selecting Export... from the popup menu and then Deployable plugins and fragments
3. Restart Eclipse to pick up the new plugin (shortcut is to choose File > Switch Workspace and incidate the same workspace).
4. Go to Window > Preferences > Copyright Tool to set your copyright preferences. For IBM committers, the template should appear as follows:

   Copyright (c) ${date} IBM Corporation. 
   All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials 
   are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0 
   which accompanies this distribution, and is available at 
   http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html  
   
   Contributors: 
      IBM Corporation - initial API and implementation

5. Set default creation year and default revision year in the preferences to the current year. Click OK to save the preferences.
6. Switch to the Resource perspective.
7. Select all projects for which you want to run the tool and select Fix Copyrights from the context menu.
8. Perform a team synchronization on the changed projects and commit the changes.