Docbook styles required those to be present, even though the templates that we
use did not show those names anywhere. But something changed semi-recently (I
would suspect docbook templates, but there was only a minor version bump in
recent years, and the changelog does not suggest anything related), and builds
now work without those entries. Let's drop this dead weight.
Tested with F26-F29, debian unstable.
$ perl -i -0pe 's/\s*<authorgroup>.*<.authorgroup>//gms' man/*xml
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.
We have a common parser, but for the user it might be
completely unobvious that the same general rules apply
to all those files. Let's add a page about the basic syntax
so that the more specific pages don't have to repeat those
details.
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.
Lennart Poettering