13.3 Performing yearly copyright update (“grand-replace”)

At the start of each year, copyright notices for all source files should be refreshed by running the following command from the top of the source tree:

make grand-replace

Internally, this invokes the script scripts/build/grand-replace.py, which performs a regular expression substitution for old-year -> new-year wherever it finds a valid copyright notice.

Note that snapshots of third party files such as texinfo.tex should not be included in the automatic update; grand-replace.py ignores these files if they are listed in the variable copied_files.