This part of the copyright blurb stems from the GPL use recommendations:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
The concept appears to originate in times where version control was per
file, instead of per tree, and was a way to glue the files together.
Ultimately, we nowadays don't live in that world anymore, and this
information is entirely useless anyway, as people are very welcome to
copy these files into any projects they like, and they shouldn't have to
change bits that are part of our copyright header for that.
hence, let's just get rid of this old cruft, and shorten our codebase a
bit.
Double newlines (i.e. one empty lines) are great to structure code. But
let's avoid triple newlines (i.e. two empty lines), quadruple newlines,
quintuple newlines, …, that's just spurious whitespace.
It's an easy way to drop 121 lines of code, and keeps the coding style
of our sources a bit tigther.
Files which are installed as-is (any .service and other unit files, .conf
files, .policy files, etc), are left as is. My assumption is that SPDX
identifiers are not yet that well known, so it's better to retain the
extended header to avoid any doubt.
I also kept any copyright lines. We can probably remove them, but it'd nice to
obtain explicit acks from all involved authors before doing that.
This macro will read a pointer of any type, return it, and set the
pointer to NULL. This is useful as an explicit concept of passing
ownership of a memory area between pointers.
This takes inspiration from Rust:
https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/enum.Option.html#method.take
and was suggested by Alan Jenkins (@sourcejedi).
It drops ~160 lines of code from our codebase, which makes me like it.
Also, I think it clarifies passing of ownership, and thus helps
readability a bit (at least for the initiated who know the new macro)
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek